About me

I am a scholar of Islam and the Baha’i Faith whose research explores religious cultures and histories predominantly through literary texts. Among other subjects, I have written about the rise of Indo-Persian culture as reflected in the works of the 14th-century Indian poet Amir Khusraw (Islamic Tolerance: Amir Khusraw and Pluralism, published by Routledge in 2010) and about gender and bilateral descent in Islam in the medieval and early modern eras (Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima, published by I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury in 2020). A third book, The Full Moon of Perfection, will be published in May 2026 by Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press. It is a critical edition and translation of a preface by Amir Khusraw. My next project is a collection of essays about the Shahnama, the Persian Book of Kings.

I earned my Ph.D. in Classical Persian Literature and Medieval Islamic History in 2007 from the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, graduating with honors. After a brief stint as a visiting scholar and lecturer at the University of Washington, I taught for 12 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before retiring as Associate Professor Emerita in 2024. In addition to teaching classes about Islam, the Qur’an, Islamic mysticism, and religions of Iran, I co-founded the Islamic Studies Research Network and served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Religious Studies at UNCG.

Among other honors, I received the Candace Bernard and Robert Glickman Dean’s Professorship in the College of Arts and Sciences of UNCG, the Foundation for Iranian Studies’ Best Ph.D. Dissertation on a Topic of Iranian Studies award, and a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. I have traveled widely in the Middle East and South Asia, including to Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, and India, where I lived for nine months while researching my dissertation.