I am a postdoc member of the ERC Advance Grant project Beyond Sharia. I work across Media Studies, Memory Studies, Religious Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies, using methodological tools from cultural analysis, media theory, and philology. My research targets lost, neglected, or silent records, such as photographic archives, radio and television repositories, digitised newspapers and periodicals, and telecommunication archives. My monograph, Irrationalities in Islam and Media in Nineteenth-Century Iran (2022) offers the first media archaeological perspective on the Iranian context. My second monograph is Remembering Umar Khayyam: Episodes of Unbelief in the Reception Histories of Persian Quatrains, and will be published by Gruyter in March 2025. The book offers new insights into the interplay of religion, media, literature, and collective memory in Iran and challenges the still dominant (neo)Orientalist approach to Middle Eastern modern history.
As a member of the Department of Religious Studies, I have contributed to the Research Master's program in Religious Studies since 2022, where I taught "Core Themes in the Study of Religions" and have regularly participated as a guest speaker in the joint UU-UvA course on "Theories and Methods" on the history of photography. I have also created and performed a lecture performance about Iran's 2022 movement titled Knot, About Iran?! and appeared in a KNAW public lecture on Rumi en de religie van de liefde.