Biography
I was born in Tehran, Iran, and later immigrated to Canada where I received my BA at the University of Toronto in Classics and English. I then moved to California to pursue a PhD in Classics at Stanford. Afterwards I headed back east and spent the first three years of my career as a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton Society of Fellows before joining the Haverford Faculty in 2020.
Research
My research explores ancient world through its various visual, sensory, and aesthetic arrangements and the new configurations and meanings these arrangements find in 20th and 21st century authors, artists, and communities. Trained in classical languages and literature, I have published on Greek drama, philosophy, and oratory in relation to ancient and modern aesthetics, broadly conceived. My interests in visuality and the sensorium have extended my research and expertise into the fields of visual and material culture, especially in the Greek classical period.
Teaching
In my teaching, I combine words with things, merge literary, visual, and media studies, and use a variety of scholarly and creative methods to recover and reevaluate the historical and contemporary significance of antiquity. My classes are generally part seminar, part workshop, and explore topics such as poetics and craftsmanship, drama and its afterlife in modern media, and the art of sports. I have also been active in theater (directing, producing, and stage managing ancient and modern dramas) and screenwriting. These and other creative endeavors play a major role in my work, especially in my teaching.
Projects
The Mirror and the Senses (book project)
The Mirror and the Senses, engages with the symbiotic fields of literary, visual, and sensory studies to write the first cultural history of the bronze mirror. I work across a wide array of materials to reveal the sensorial and conceptual depth of the bronze mirror: from poetry, philosophy, and technical treatises, to actual mirrors, painting, and iconography, as well as practices of beautification and ritual. This broad, multi-scalar and interdisciplinary exploration unveils the synaesthetic and materialist undercurrents of the intellectual and artistic work on vision and sensation in the classical period. Mirroring and reflection, I argue, went far beyond simple and straightforward visual representation, and instead instantiated an amplification of the external world that constantly gave way to broader meditations on the capacity of the arts. Ultimately, The Mirror and the Senses uses this fine-grained cultural history to refigure the very grounds for the study of aesthetics.
THE::SENSE::ARCHIVE
A collaboration with Monica Huerta. the::sense::archive is an incubator, an emerging creative collective and research network. the::sense::archive is not a thing or a place; it is a pursuit for a way of working, dreaming, knowing, activating, and creating. the::sense::archive programs center artist-practitioners and their processes. Our programs are hubs for collective theorizing, where sensoria take the lead over logic-driven forms of making.
Select Articles and Essays
“The Travelling Hat: Antiquity on the Move in Pasolini’s Edipo Re (in Pasolini for Art and Art History, forthcoming)
“The Liver and the Mirror” (in Mirrors and Mirroring: from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, Bloomsbury)
“The Other Side of the Mirror” (in Objects and Affect: The Materialities of Greek Tragedy, Bloomsbury).