A statement of my teaching philosophy, such as it is, is available upon request.
In my most recent position, at Drexel University in Philadelphia, I was involved in the design and administration of a large Intro to Python Programming course (~350 students, in two lecture sections and many lab groups), which was held in the 2025 winter quarter. The lead instructor of the course was Prof. Joshua Agar; I worked with him to build a bespoke course management system. The basic idea was that everything should be practical. Lecture slides, assignments, quizzes and exams, and even most readings were in the form of Jupyter notebooks. The students accessed these notebooks on customized JupyterHub instances that we set up and hosted for them. I also wrote a FastAPI back-end (on top of Postgres databases) that allowed for automated grading of assignments, management of student information, and more. The whole stack was deployed on Azure Kubernetes. It was a hectic, occasionally frightening experience building and maintaining this software system that was in constant use by hundreds of students. I learned a great deal, though, handling everything from the database layer up to the Jupyter notebook front-end. It was my first time getting involved in programming education, and I would be excited to do more of this in the future.
During my years at the Freie Universität Berlin, my responsibilities were primarily focused on research, but I did have several opportunities to teach courses. I led three seminars: on the history of the Near East in the early modern period (i.e., the so-called “gunpowder empires” era), in the spring/summer of 2021; on classical Arabic literature as a cosmopolitan tradition, in the spring/summer of 2023; and on digital philological methods for Arabic and Islamicate Studies, in the spring/summer of 2024. Most of this teaching was in English, though I also used some German and Arabic in the classroom, as circumstances demanded. My time at the FU coincided with the launch of a new English-language MA program in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East, from which many of my students were drawn.
Earlier, while pursuing my PhD at the University of Chicago, I did some teaching work practically every quarter for several years. The greatest demand for lecturers was in the language programs; I taught many Persian and Arabic classes, from the introductory to the advanced level (though more often the former than the latter). Another valuable part of my pedagogical training in Chicago was serving as a preceptor—an academic-advisory role that involves, inter alia, helping students to research and write their final theses. I held this position, at various times, in both the BA program of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the MA program of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.
I look forward to every new chance to teach a course! One of my longtime dreams is to guide a group of students through Wheeler M. Thackston’s textbook, A Millennium of Classical Persian Poetry.