Research

Much of what we know about the past has been shaped by categories and modes of analysis that took shape during the nineteenth century. Many of our frameworks for understanding the past are themselves connected to the colonial production of knowledge and the diverse efforts by which reformists and nationalists set about reconstituting history in their own image. My scholarship begins from this recognition and works outward from it, drawing on a diverse archive that spans numerous languages, historical periods, and geographical regions to ask what a fuller, more capacious account of the past might look like.

Three areas of inquiry have organized this work. The first concerns Islamic intellectual and social history in the broadest sense: the lives of manuscripts, the circulation of ideas across languages and empires, the traditions of law, cosmography, and encyclopedism from antiquity onwards. The second concerns philosophies of wonder and enchantment and the diverse ways hidden forces in nature have been theorized and understood, in terms that stretch the boundaries between science, magic, and religion. The third draws on critical theory as a framework for conceptualizing linguistic, spatial, and epistemic difference: for questioning what we know about the past and why we think we know it.

These lines of inquiry converge on a shared problem: the unequal measures by which our disciplines have divided and hierarchized human histories. By tracing the jagged edge of historical memory, attending to what has been forgotten, suppressed, or misread, my work forms part of wider efforts to situate the study of Islam and Arabic and Persian literary cultures in a genuinely global context, and to reimagine the human past in its full complexity and strangeness.