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 current book project, Sexual Sinners and Chaste Heroes, 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.
I am keen to hear from prospective graduate students working in the fields of pre-modern Arabic literature, Islamic studies (primarily pre-modern) and medieval and early-modern Islamic history.
Research Focus
Arabic literature, Islamic studies, gender, Islamic history
Awards and Honors
- Runner-up for the Royal Asiatic Society’s David Morgan Prize 2022
Publications
"Emotional Manipulation, Coercion, and Precarity in the Tales of Jamīl and Buthayna" Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 33 (2025): 149-180
“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
