I am a Lecturer in Islamic and Middle East Studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany and was a Junior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) during the academic year 2019/20. From October 2021 until September 2022, I was also a visiting professor at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Culture and Religion, University of Frankfurt, Germany.
My work as an intellectual historian specializes in the 20th and 21st century with a particular focus on global Islam and Shi’ism. I am interested in how the Islamic scholarly tradition is debated and negotiated in modern and contemporary Muslim societies. My research revolves around the travel of ideas between West, Central, and South Asia. I focus on religious authority, sectarianism, Islamic political thought, the Islamic schools of law, and the relationship of Islam and science. Fieldwork over the last couple of years has led me to Egypt, Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, and Lebanon. My work draws on materials in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu.
Before coming to Freiburg in October 2017, I was a Research Fellow in Islamic Studies at Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD in September 2015 at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. My dissertation “Relocating the Centers of Shīʿī Islam: Religious Authority, Reform, and the Limits of the Transnational in Colonial India and Pakistan” was advised by Prof. Muhammad Qasim Zaman. It was published as In a Pure Muslim Land. Shi’ism between Pakistan and the Middle East by UNC Press in 2019.
In May 2019, I was elected a member of the German Young Academy, the Junge Akademie.