About me

I’m a Persian and Arabic philologist on my academic side (PhD, University of Chicago, 2020), and in recent years a research software engineer professionally. My latest full-time role, which is just wrapping up at the time of writing (summer 2025), was at Drexel University in Philadelphia, where I worked as a Research DevOps/MLOps Engineer and Associate Researcher on an NSF-funded project in the Colleges of Engineering and Computing & Informatics. The project came to an untimely end—an all-too-common occurrence these days—but it was a good learning experience nonetheless.

Prior to my move to the Philadelphia area (where I hope to remain for the foreseeable), I spent several years in Germany, working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and eventually also as a Research Software Engineer, in the Seminar for Semitic and Arabic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. It was Beatrice Gründler who brought me there to join her ERC- and Leibniz Prize-funded research project, AnonymClassic, which focuses on the textual history of the fable-book Kalīla and Dimna. I am grateful to remain affiliated with Prof. Gründler’s project as a Non-Resident Fellow. She and I, along with our colleague Johannes Stephan, are also in the process of co-authoring a monograph, Metamorphoses of the “Indian Book”: Refigurations of Kalīla and Dimna in Arabic and Persian Literature (to be published by Brill in 2026).

Another high point of my work in Berlin was my involvement in Closing the Gap in Non-Latin-Script Data, a research initiative that advocates for improvements to the state of the field of Multilingual Digital Humanities—with a particular focus on the challenges faced by scholars working with texts in non-Latin-script languages, in under-resourced fields like Arabic Studies. I took over the day-to-day leadership of “Closing the Gap” in fall 2022, then wrote the grant proposal that secured funding for the project through mid 2026. The group is now managed by Christian Casey; I still contribute remotely, time permitting.

My original academic specialization was in the history of the classical Persian literary tradition, poetry above all. I went to the University of Chicago to study with Franklin D. Lewis, whose premature passing in 2022 left a void in the field of Persian Literature Studies that will not soon be filled. I also had the privilege in Chicago of studying Iranian and Central Asian history with John E. Woods, and classical Arabic literature with Tahera Qutbuddin. In my doctoral years, I became fascinated by the way that what we know today as the “canon” of early classical Persian poetry—the arc from Rudaki in the tenth century CE to Hafiz in the fourteenth—was already clearly taking shape by the late fifteenth century, as can be seen in retrospectives on Persian literary history written by Timurid authors like ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami and Dawlatshah Samarqandi. I homed in on the genre of the “biographical anthology of poets,” or tazkira, which also rose to popularity in the late Timurid and early Safavid-Mughal periods. My feeling was (and is) that tazkiras contain some of the best available evidence on canon formation, the rise and fall of stylistic trends in Persian poetry, and similar processes.

So it was that I chose the topic of my dissertation, The Lives of Sam Mirza (923–75/1517–67): Dynastic Strife and Literary World-Building in Early Safavid Iran. That project was built around the career of a sixteenth-century Safavid prince, Sam Mirza, who managed to author a precious anthology of poets (most of them his own contemporaries) before being imprisoned and executed at the order of his brother, Shah Tahmasb. Sam Mirza’s tazkira, known as the Tuhfa-yi Sami, is one of the more idiosyncratic and fascinating examples of the genre. I defended the dissertation in June 2020—via Zoom from Berlin, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—with a committee consisting of Lewis, Woods, and Cornell H. Fleischer (who has also since left us).

My move to Berlin in 2019 shifted my career in many ways. It would take too much space to try to explain it all here, but I can at least enumerate a handful of those new directions. First, I went from being a Persianist with a specialization in the late medieval and early modern periods to someone with serious research interests also in earlier eras. This was because one of my primary roles in the Kalīla and Dimna project was (and remains) to study the Persian translation of the fables written by Abu l-Ma‘ali Nasrallah Munshi in the mid twelfth century CE. Second, and relatedly, I rekindled my love for classical Arabic literature. Nasrallah Munshi’s work is practically bilingual, dating from a period when authors sought to elevate Persian literature by drawing on more mature Arabic traditions. This got me interested broadly in premodern literary exchange between Persian and Arabic—a topic that seems obvious but has been surprisingly neglected in the field. Third, it was in Berlin that I became a software developer in earnest. Prof. Gründler and others in the Arabic Studies department encouraged this, and I spent many long days and nights during the pandemic learning how to write high-quality software.

I consider myself an avid programmer and open-source maintainer and contributor. My favorite language is Rust, but I have also written tons of TypeScript/JavaScript (on both the front and back ends) and Python. Other languages to which I’m partial include Go and Zig. Honestly, I just enjoy diving into software systems, figuring out how they work, and making them operate as accurately and efficiently as possible. Check out my GitHub profile to see some of my open-source code. I’m especially proud of my implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm in Rust.

Longer ago, I was an undergraduate at Princeton University, where I was introduced to Persian philology by Michael A. Barry. I was lucky in those years to have many opportunities to live in the Near East, studying Persian and Arabic and learning about the world. This included a semester plus a summer in Cairo; a few summers and a full academic year in Kabul, largely spent working at the American University of Afghanistan; and a summer plus most of a year in Oman, split among Salalah, Muscat, and Khasab. What an adventure! I would love to return to any of those places. Afghanistan holds a special place in my heart.

My other interests in life include playing the double bass; baking (especially pies and bread); studying the oddities of financial markets (I hope someday to pass the third CFA exam); typography; and, of course, spending time with my wife and children.

See the links to my various online profiles. My résumé/CV is available upon request.