I'm an assistant professor of early Islam at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, jointly appointed in the Religious Studies program and the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department. I obtained my PhD from the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies program at NYU in 2024. My dissertation was titled "Between Bukhārā and Baghdād: New Histories for Sufism's Formative Period." My primary research interests are the dimensions of medieval Sufism, from the textual and conceptual to the historical, social, and political.

My projects—published, forthcoming, and underway—treat topics in the history of Sufism, new manuscript finds, early Islamic theology, hagiography, and social history. I am currently working on two book projects: the first, under review, is titled The Early Sufis of Hamadhān: Texts, Studies, and Translations, and the second is tentatively titled Origins of Sufism: Founding Myths and Their Afterlives. To read more about these projects, go to my Projects and Pubs page.

I also work fairly extensively with unpublished manuscripts of early Sufi texts, and I'm in the process of producing a number of editions, including Abū Manṣūr al-Iṣfahānī's Shawāhid al-taṣawwuf. I'm broadly interested in questions of religiosity in early Islam within the context of Late Antiquity, with special interest in the relationship between early Islamic renunciation and late antique Christian mysticism and asceticism.

I maintain a significant interest in developing digital humanities projects that bridge the gap between the non-technical user and technical developments in the fields of Arabic natural language processing and digital corpora. In that vein, my tools are centered on facilitating research and providing access to what I have called digitally neglected texts. I am currently working on a major project called al-Kashshāf, an open-source tool for searching a meta-corpus of nearly 7,200 Arabic texts, which aims to become the primary tool for researchers interested in pre-modern Arabic texts. To learn more about my digital humanities work, go to my Digital Humanities page.