I am a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Liberal Studies at New York University and hold a PhD in political theory and global politics from the New School for Social Research. I’ve also had the opportunity to teach in various other universities in NYC including Lang at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Hunter College at the City University of New York. Coming from a background of revolution, war, migration, and marginalization, I have been thinking about the problem of sociopolitical violence for most of my intellectual life. My research draws on the fields of political theory, gender studies, psychoanalysis, literature, Middle-Eastern studies, as well as international relations. 

One of such scenes of violence that I have examined in the past is the state practice of forced confessions in Iranian politics, particularly in the aftermath of the 2009 civil movement and the show-trials that followed. My work follows how modern international discourses of sovereignty and history produce the confession as an act of state legitimacy. 

A more recent scene of violence that I have been studying is where some forms of feminism uncannily find themselves in alliance with alt-right and neoliberal politics. I am interested in how these feminist discourses are organized around the principle of identity and how feminist identity politics reproduce patriarchal and phallic forms of violence. To think about feminism beyond identity, I turn to psychoanalysis and ancient tragedy, particularly Sophocles’ Antigone and explore ways of dealing with traumatic loss that do not trap us in the masculinist politics of identity and enmity.

My upcoming project is a study of multiple and at times contradictory significations of the hijab in works of classical Persian poetry, particularly that of Hafiz, Khayyam, and Rumi. I am interested in how such contested significations intervene in the extensive feminist debates on the veil, debates that have to a large extent counterintuitively consolidated the veil into the quintessential identity of ‘the Muslim woman.’

In the time that remains, I try and try again to nurture intimate bonds of love, friendship, and community, all too often failing, and sporadically arriving home in ek-stasis.