About me
I do lots of stuff, but this site is primarily devoted to my work as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. My main interest is the history and literature of what Marshall Hodgson memorably calls ‘Islamdom,’ basically anywhere “Muslims and their faith are recognized as prevalent and socially dominant”; more specifically, I like studying the prose and poetry of this region from the medieval/middle periods (say, 1000 CE) up to the modern period. I mostly focus on Persian and Arabic as my research languages, but Urdu and Ottoman Turkish are also an interest of mine. Some of my recent projects have been on the development of the shahrāshūb genre in the early modern period, fate and kingship in the Shāhnāmah, the motif of Layla and Majnūn, the Egyptian writers Yūsuf Idrīs and Yahya al-Tāhir ʿAbd Allāh, Persian short stories, the perception of animals in medieval Islam, and the cosmology of the Persian poet Nezâmi. I have also studied French and Italian and hope to keep these languages up as actively as I can to use them as a comparative foil in my studies.
I really like translation, analysis, literary history, other kinds of history, religious studies, and music. I also teach Egyptian Arabic at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago and work as an Arabic bibliographer in the Joseph Regenstein Library, and have been involved in organizations like the U of C Arabic Circle, the MEHAT Workshop and Conference, and the Middle East Music Ensemble. No, I don’t get out much. :)
About this site
This site carries material from two of my major pursuits: academics and music. The academics are largely found, of course, within my CV, translations, and papers that I put online. In addition, you will also find a link to my blog, which will tend to be about my works in progress, academic or otherwise.
Music has always played a major role in my life—over the years, I’ve played the violin, the guitar, the bass, the tenor guitar, the viola, the setar, the oud, and the radio with varying degrees of proficiency. I also like to sing (in private) and write my own compositions (which I rarely finish). Here, you’ll be able to learn a little about my various activities as a musician, as well as download those albums that I have been willing to declare complete. I divided the site into two pages, one dedicated to primarily acoustic work, the other, electric/electronic.