About

Biography · contact

I work on empire and Islam as entangled sources of authority, with particular attention to historical memory and state formation.

My first book, Polymaths of Islam, came out with Cornell in 2020. A second, Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch, followed in 2026 and takes up indirect rule in Islamic societies on the eve of the Soviet transformation. Along the way I have written about the Soviet afterlife of the Persian cultural sphere, about modern language politics and what it does to language pedagogy, and a synthetic Cambridge History chapter on Persianate migration, building on an earlier contribution to Asia Inside Out.

Chasing all this has meant more than half a decade living and working across Eurasia: scouring Arabic biographical dictionaries in Damascus, puzzling over Arabic medical treatises in Cairo, pawing through Russian colonial records in Saint Petersburg, surveying religious endowments in Uzbekistan, deciphering Persian manuscripts in Tajikistan, and digging into Urdu sources in archives throughout India.

I hold a PhD in history from Princeton, an MA from Georgetown, and a BA from Carleton College. I am an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of Pittsburgh.

I live in Pittsburgh. When I’m not researching or teaching, I’m in a canoe with my two dogs.

You can reach me at , and find my CV at this link.

Illustrations: photographs by the author and historical photographs, digitally stylized. Details in the page source.