Associate Professor
Graduate Program Director
I am Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies and have worked in the Institute of Islamic Studies since 2009. I teach across all periods of Persian literature with a specialization in the Persian poetry of pre-colonial South Asia. My first book, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016), is a study of poetics and politics in the work of the poet 'Abd al-Qādir Bedil (d.1720) and his circle. My second book, Sohrab Sepehri, The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill, 2022) is a co-translation with an introduction of the collected poems of Sohrab Sepehri, a major Iranian modernist. I am completing a monograph on the poetics of the famous quintet of Persian poems by Nizami Ganjavi (d.1209). My critical edition and blank verse translation of Amir Khusraw's Nuh Sipihr (The Nine Skies) is forthcoming with Brill. Forthcoming with Penguin India is an anthology of my English translations of Persian literature on India.
I offer a graduate seminar on pre-modern literary theory and meta-literary discourses called Pre-Modern Persian Literary Criticism; another on Islamicate discourses and practices of selfhood called Autobiography in the Islamic World; another on Amir Khusraw; and another on Nizami Ganjavi. I also teach undergraduate courses on Persian literature in English translation and on the literatures (especially Urdu and Persian) and histories of Islam in South Asia.
Research Interests
I am mainly interested in historically grounded and theoretically informed comparative literary studies of Persian and other literatures. My most recent journal publications have focused on the relations between prosody, mysticism and poetics across Persian, Braj Bhasha, Sanskrit and Arabic; and on the intellectual eclecticism of early modern South Asian Sufi visions of selfhood. I am completing a monograph on the poetics of Nizami Ganjavi's (d.1209) famous quintet of long poems in their multi-religious and multilingual trans-Caucasian context. My introduction to my critical edition and blank verse translation of Amir Khusraw's 1318 mixed genre court poem The Nine Skies (forthcoming with Brill) sets forth its poetics in relation to ambient Persian and Arabic literatures as well as explicating its appropriations of Sanskrit courtly poetry in cantos.
Representative Publications
- ““To What Song Does the Vein of Poetry’s Lute Throb?” The Hypotactic Poetics of Bīdil’s Persian Ghazals in Sanskrit-Hindi-Arabic Meters.”Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 6 (2023): 163-84.
- “A Novel Model of Mind in Bīdel’s Sinai of Enlightenment.” Journal of World Philosophies 8 (Summer 2023): 1-16.
- “Two Interpretive Postures and Two Kinds of Friendship in Mughal Commentaries on Sa‘dī’s ҳܱ”. Publication of Modern Languages Association/ PMLA, Volume 137, Issue 2, March, 2022, pp. 246 - 261.
- “Framing Bedil, Arguing the Indo-Persian Self” (co-authored with Sajjad Rizvi as an introduction to this special issue on Bedil and selfhood). Journal of South Asian Intellectual History (June 2020). (June 2020).
- “Inscribing the Eternal into the Everyday: Voice in Bedil’s ܱ粹’āt”. Journal of South Asian Intellectual History (June 2020).
- “Translating Rāma as a Proto-Muḥammadan Prophet: Masīḥ’s Masnavī-i Rām va Sītā”. Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 65, 2018.
- “Climbing with Ṣā’eb, Sinking with Ghanī: A Comparison of Two Ghazals on Poetry.” International Journal of Persian Literature, Volume 2, 2017.
- “Bīdil’s Portrait: Asceticism and Autobiography”. Philological Encounters. Leiden: Brill: Volume 1, Issue 1-4, 2016.
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- “The Local Universality of Poetic Pleasure: Sirājuddin ‘Ali Khān Ārzu and the Speaking Subject”. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, March 2013. Volume, 50 No. 1.
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- “Finitude and the Authorship of Fiction: Muhammad ‘Awfi’s Preface to his Lubāb al-albāb (The Piths of Intellects, 1221 C.E.)”. The Arab Studies Journal, Spring 2011. Vol. XIX No.1.
