About Me

I am an associate professor of Art of the Islamic World at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, where I have been teaching since 2017. I hold a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Comparative Literature and Society and in Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in the City of New York, an MA in Art History from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and an MFA in Photography from Honar University of Tehran. Prior to joining RISD, I taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Tehran University, the Università degli Studi di Milano, and in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.
My research focuses on contemporary art, particularly in Iran and the Middle East. I work across postcolonial theory, the politics of translation and interpretation, theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism, and the ethics of readership. My writing has appeared in academic journals in the United States, Germany, and Iran, including in Grey Room (MIT Press) ARTMargins (MIT Press), Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (Duke University Press), Articulations (Freie Universität–Berlin), and Herfeh: Honarmand (Tehran).
I am currently completing a manuscript titled Unreadings: Contemporary Iranian Art and Art History’s Monolingualism, which examines how Western disciplinary forms—particularly art history and criticism—reinscribe normative aesthetic expectations, demanding that Iranian art conform to Euro-American frameworks of meaning, value, and aspiration.