Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Arabic Studies
- Islamic Studies
- Late Antiquity
Areas of Interest
- Medieval Islamic history
- Hadith Literature
- Late antique traditions and Islamic thought
- Abbasid society
- Religion, gender and culture in the Middle East
Biography
I am a historian of the medieval Middle East, with a focus on religion, society and culture in the early Abbasid period, from roughly the 8th to 10th centuries CE. I received my PhD (2020) in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. I also studied at Harvard Divinity School for the M.T.S. in Islamic Studies, and did my undergraduate (B.A. in Humanities) at Yale University. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, I served as a Research Associate at the Centre of Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge.
I currently work mainly with early Islamic traditionist literature and related texts. My first book project examines etiquettes of speech (ādāb al-lisān) and ideas about gossip and sin in pietist traditions of the so-called Zuhd movement and other sources such as homiletic ḥadīth, ritual law, and exegesis. I attempt to situate these discourses in the social and intellectual context of early Muslim society and in terms of late antique asceticism, especially the teachings of the Desert Fathers. I have thus become attentive to intertextuality in these Arabic sources and their reappropriation of Jewish and Christian wisdom literature, aphorisms, and apocalyptic visions.
My work is driven by a broader fascination with the norms of mundane life and public morality, as well as an engagement with current scholarship in cultural studies. I am pursuing further research on notions of scholarly propriety among the medieval ʿulamāʾ, as evident through biographical dictionaries and belletristic sources. Among other subjects, I also retain an interest in book history and have written about the Thousand and One Nights and its reception in early modern Europe. I teach courses at U of T on the history of the Caliphate and the Islamicate world at large, religious conversion in medieval history, the Sufi tradition, and other topics.
Education
Publications
- Disgust in Early Islamic Thought: The Affects of Ḥadith and Moral Aversion in Pious Traditions (Equinox Publishing Ltd. : 2025)
- Teaching the Worlds of the Thousand and One Nights (Modern Language Association, New York : 2022)
- Genie in a Bookshop: Print Culture, Authorship, and 'The Affair of the Eighth Volume' at the Origins of Les Mille et une nuits (Brill, Leiden : 2020)
- Before Europe: The Christian West in the Annals of Medieval Islam (Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles : 2018)