Above: me at the home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf (Monk House) in East Sussex. Photo by Kate Gould.
For my bio, see here.
For profiles of my work & interviews with me, please see here.
I am Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies University of London. My creative and critical practice engages with literary, political, and legal theory. Developing and current interests include free speech and comparative legal cultures. Prior to joining SOAS in 2023, I taught at the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, and Yale-NUS College (Singapore).
My books include Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (2023), The Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (2021), and the award-winning Writers and Rebels: The Literatures of Insurgency in the Caucasus (2016). I have translated books from Georgian and Persian. I am co-editor of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Poetics: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Literary Theory (2024) and The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (2020). My articles have received awards ranging from the International Society for Intellectual History’s Charles Schmitt Prize to the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages Association’s Florence Howe Award for Feminist Scholarship.
Writers of importance to me include Virginia Woolf, Mahmoud Darwish, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze, Jorge Luis Borges, Danilo Kis, the Chechen poet Magomed Mamakaev, George Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Edith Wharton. Thinkers who have influenced me include Giambattista Vico, Walter Benjamin, Ibn Rushd, Friedrich Nietzsche, & Emma Goldman.
Much of my research is based on fieldwork conducted in Iran (2012, 2014); Tajikistan (2007); Palestine (2011-12); Syria (2010); Egypt (2010, 2012); Azerbaijan (2006); Hyderabad, India (2008); Daghestan (2004, 2006); Georgia (2004-6, 2013); Chechnya and Ingushetia (2006).
The best place to find my work is on Medium, where I often adapt my scholarship for a wider audience. I am on Substack too and will post there more regularly soon.
My university profile My Hcommons profile
My YouTube Channel Me on Blue Sky
My CV on Academia.edu
