Overview
I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2022, where I then worked as the Departmental Lecturer in Classical Arabic Literature until coming to Cornell. My research focuses primarily on sexuality, gender and emotions in literature and thought in the pre-modern Arab-Islamic world. I am particularly interested in how sexuality and sexual desire were conceived and experienced through imagination. My current book project, Narratives of Love: Chastity, Sexuality and Desire in Medieval Arabic Literature and Thought, focuses on how stories and storytelling, both religious and profane, became central to the construction of moral ideas around sexual lives and desires, how stories were used to imagine the feelings and emotional experience of people caught in the grip of passion for someone with whom they cannot consummate their relationship. Drawing not only on literary and religious studies, I also integrate queer and feminist theory into my reading of the medieval, thinking through how our reading of past imaginations and conceptions of sexual desire and experience are filtered through our contemporary world and (dis)comfort within it.
Research Focus
- Arabic Literature
- Islamic Studies
- Sexuality Studies
- Gender Studies
- Queer and Feminist Theory
- History of Emotions
- Intellectual History
Awards and Honors
- Runner-up for the Royal Asiatic Society’s David Morgan Prize 2022
Publications
“It’s All Just Poetry: Writing ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿah’s Life” in Journal of Arabic Literature 52:3–4 (2021), 321–50
“Colonial South America, Identity and Race as Seen by a Chaldean Priest from Baghdad” in CompLit: Journal of European Literature, Arts and Society 2 (2021), 115–43
“Building a Library: The Arabic and Persian Manuscript Collection of Sir William Jones” in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31:1 (2021), 1–70
