I am a postdoc fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. I work across the fields of decolonial Media History, Memory Studies, Persian and Religious Studies. With an emphasis on the Middle East, my research examines how media technologies such as the printing press, telegraphy, radio, and screen-based media organise past and present religious contexts in negotiation with and distinct from Western(ised) models. I am particularly interested in developing media theoretical knowledge that is grounded in the rich but underexplored Persian and Arabic milieus – from fiction, poetry, and Sufi literature to photography, periodicals, and religious performances. My work pursues a rigorous de-Europeanisation of media theory by unearthing peripheral materials about media practices and concepts in Middle Eastern cultures. My first monograph, Irrationalities in Islam and Media in Nineteenth-Century Iran (2022) offers the first media archaeological perspective on the Iranian context and develops a decolonised non-peripheral culture-specific media theoretical approach to Iran. I am currently in the final phases of writing my second monograph Decolonial Unbelief: The Global Heritage of Khayyamic Poetry, to be published in Gruyter. The book offers new insights into the interplay of religion, memory, and media in Iran and challenges the still dominant (neo)Orientalist Eurocentric approach to Iranian intellectual history. Similarly, in my upcoming article "Towards an Archaeology of the Televisual Image in Iran" in the Routledge Companion to Media Archaeology, I will sketch a few decolonial episodes in the cultural history of televisual media in Iran. 

As a lecturer, I contribute to the Research Master's program in Religious Studies, where I teach "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 in Iran. 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.

I am a reviewer for the Journal of Secularism and Nonreligion and Bibliotheca Orientalis, and a co-editor for the forthcoming De Gruyter series on The Mystical Philosophy of Islam.