Education:

Ph.D., Brown University
M.A., Stanford University
M.Phil., University of Cambridge
B.A., Yale University

Research:

What does it mean to know? How do embodied practices, religious experiences, and social identities mark certain people as knowing beings? How do they bar others from authoritative knowledge? My work explores how Muslim thinkers have approached these questions to fashion themselves and the world(s) around them. I specialize in medieval Sufism and Islamic philosophy, reading theoretical texts, encyclopedias, hagiographies, diagrams, and prayer manuals in conversation with contemporary approaches to knowing and being.

My dissertation won the 2022 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Humanities. My first book, Lost in a Sea of Letters: Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya and the Plurality of Sufi Knowledge, explores the life and work of Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya (d. 1252), a Mongol-era Sufi whose arcane treatises inspired generations of mystics and messiahs. Foregrounding Ḥamūya’s deconstructive ethos and radical openness to interpretation, the book reveals how embracing plurality could thrive as a mode of social, intellectual, and spiritual competition.

I am currently at work on a book project that uses jazz as a framework to theorize the relationship between abstract theory, embodied practice, and improvised social performance among medieval Sufis.

Selected Publications:

“Riffing on/as the Real: Towards Jazz as a Framework for Medieval Sufism.” Sophia 65, no. 3 (2026): 531–55. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-026-01143-8.

“Being and Time: Prophetic Cycles and Political Revolution in Ibn Qasī's Doffing Sandals.” Journal of Sufi Studies 15, no. 1 (2026): 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1163/22105956-bja10045.

Lost in a Sea of Letters: Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya and the Plurality of Sufi Knowledge. Islamicate Intellectual History 14. Leiden: Brill, 2025. https://brill.com/display/title/71918.

“Prayer, Deconstruction, and Boundless Play: Saʿd al-Dīn Ḥamūya’s Avant-Garde Sufism.” History of Religions 63, no. 3 (2024): 290–320. https://doi.org/10.1086/728125.

On God and the World: An Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistles 49-51. Edited and translated with Wilferd Madelung, Carmela Baffioni, and Nuha Alshaar. Epistles of the Brethren of Purity Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019.

Teaching:

I teach on a variety of themes in religious studies and Islamic studies. In the classroom, I encourage students to put their own experiences and commitments into dialogue with course material, pushing them to develop their own self-conscious, morally satisfying, and analytically productive approaches to both academic and personal concerns.

From 2023–2026, I was an inaugural Faculty Fellow at JMU’s Honors College, for which I taught a seminar titled A Love Supreme: Music and Spiritual Discipline. Prior to JMU, I was the inaugural Mellon Teaching Fellow in Global Islamic Studies at Connecticut College.