Welcome to my page!

I have been researching and reporting about Iran as an academic and journalist for over twenty years. I am currently an assistant professor of media and Middle East studies at the University of Texas at Austin. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, was the inaugural Yarshater Postdoctoral Associate in Iranian Studies at Yale University, and became the visiting professor in the anthropology of religion at Harvard Divinity School. I am the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017), and have published in academic journals such as Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Previously, I was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. My recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, I launched the podcast series “Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran,” which captures and archives important knowledge on the ongoing uprising in Iran.

Woman Life Freedom Podcast

This is a podcast series in which we go deep in conversations with experts on various aspect of the revolutionary uprising that began in Iran in September 2022, when 22-year old Mahsa Jina Amini was killed in Morality Police detention.

In each episode, we unpack an important aspect of what has been a historic moment unfolding in Iran. We draw both on our experts’ professional insights, but also engage with them as humans living through these momentous times.