I am a political theorist and Visiting Assistant Professor in Government at Smith College. I write at the intersection of histories and theories of media and mediation, anti- and de-colonial history and theory, Iranian Studies, and Middle East Studies. I have designed and taught courses on ethics and justice in modern political thought, the legacies of secularism in the Islamic Revival, propaganda and post-truth politics, and the role that religion has played in social movements in the Global South.

My book manuscript, The Principle of Ruin: Revolutionary Iran and the Myth of Politics, offers a rethinking of the public sphere with focus on the role media has played in social movements before and after the 1979 Revolution in Iran. While public spheres are typically thought of as places for rational deliberation, this book excavates the archive of the Revolution and its afterlives to argue that ‘mediascapes’ are places where social actors participate in the production and circulation of political myths.

Before Smith, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University, and an ACLS Emerging Voices Fellow at the University of Virginia.

You can download my CV here.