Keywords

19th century U.S.Literature and Culture, Law and Literature, Feudal Studies

Biography

I'm a scholar and teacher of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. I'm also happy to serve as Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT).

Since 2017, I have taught the humanities, political philosophy, and multiethnic American literature in the College of Liberal Arts. My research and public writing have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, J19, ESQ, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other venues.  My first book, Medieval America: Feudalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Culture (University of Georgia Press, 2020), argues that feudal law and medieval literature shaped American ideas about race, class, and gender in the nineteenth century. My current project, Pestilential Stuff: Conspiracy Theories and Economic Crisis in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Culture, considers how American culture has reckoned with economic decline and political crisis through the lens of conspiracy and secret societies. 

I was born in Lexington, Kentucky, where there are lots of horses and relatively few other Iranians. I hold a B.A. in Individualized Study from New York University and Ph.D. in English from the University of Southern California. At CHAT, I work to build new bridges between faculty research and the undergraduate classroom and to celebrate undergraduate research excellence in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. 

Website

Selected Publications

Books

• Medieval America: Feudalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Culture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020).

Articles

• “National Culture, Attribution, and the Politics of Style: Poe’s Anti-Masonic Writing,” Arizona Quarterly 81.3 (Fall 2025): 1 – 33.
• “‘The Little Mistress’: Autonomy and Domestic Relations in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 6.2 (Spring 2018): 147 – 165. 
• “Feudalism, Individualism, and Authority in Later Emerson,” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62.1 (1^stQuarter 2016): 77 – 114.        
• “The Rhetoric of Hypocrisy: The Pardoner’s Replication in His Critics.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 54 (Sept. 2012): 79-94.

Book Chapters

• “Eschaton of Abundance: Transcendental Ecological Apocalypse in Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think,” Left in the West, ed. Gioia Elisa Woods (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2018).

Non-Refereed Articles and Reviews

• “Histories That Command Respect: On Jodi Dean’s Capital’s Grave,” Public Books (forthcoming)
• “Review: Annie Proulx’s Barkskins,” Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2016)

Ongoing

• Pestilential Stuff: Conspiracy Theories and Economic Crisis in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Culture

Courses Taught

• IH 851: The Good Life
• IH 852: The Common Good
• Honors IH 951: The Good Life
• Honors IH 952: The Common Good
• ENG 934: Honors Representing Race
• HIST 937: Honors First-Person America
• HIST 2900: Honors Special Topics I: Mérida, From Colonialism to Tourism
• PHIL 2125: Philosophy of African-American Experience