I am a scholar, policy professional, geopolitical analyst, and writer working across the humanities and technology. I received my PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia in 2025, where my research focused on Persian and Indo-Persian literary and intellectual traditions, particularly the relationship between poetry, philosophy, and ways of knowing.
Since completing my academic training, I have brought this attention to language, interpretation, and cultural context into the private sector. My work has included geopolitical analysis, multilingual sentiment analysis, AI Trust & Safety, and technology policy. At FilterLabs AI, I analyzed political sentiment and emerging narratives across Iranian digital spaces, including research on attitudes toward regime change that was later featured in The New York Times. At Meta, I worked on high-risk multimodal and agentic AI safety and policy cases involving hate speech, terrorism, child safety, privacy, misinformation, and other areas where language, culture, and model behavior intersect. My current work as a Policy Enforcement Specialist at Tiktok USDS (E-Commerce) continues to focus on policy and platform safety in technology.
Across these roles, I am especially interested in how institutions and technological systems interpret complex human behavior: how cultural and linguistic context enters policy, how emerging risks are recognized, and how decisions made at scale shape public life.
Alongside my policy and research work, I write poetry and fiction in Urdu, English, and Persian. My academic, public, and creative writing has appeared in peer-reviewed publications, op-eds, and literary journals, and I have presented my research at more than fifteen international conferences.
DISSERTATION
My dissertation, “The texture, poetics, and the taste of Love and Knowledge in Amīr Khusraw and Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī’s works,” examines the writings of two seminal Persian poets, Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī (d. 1289) and Amīr Khusraw (d. 1325). Both of these figures played an influential role in shaping the literary and intellectual culture of the thirteenth-century Indian Subcontinent and the Islamicate tradition. In my dissertation, I explore how both of these thinkers, in their own distinct ways, centered poetry as a way of knowing. By including cosmology, metaphysics, the relationship between the human and the Divine, and experiential dimensions such as love (‘ishq), ambiguity (īhām), and tasting (ẕawq) as ways of knowing, they inadvertently expanded the conventional scope and sources of knowledge.
While Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise, Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection (Dibāchāh-i dīvān-i Ghurrat al-Kamāl), that outlines the role between poetry and knowledge (ḥikmah), ‘Irāqī ostensibly performed poetry in his treatise Divine Flashes (Lama’āt) through his ingenious and careful use of poetic devices such as metaphor (istiāra), allusion (kināyā), and metonymy (majāz mursal). Through this method, ‘Irāqī not only synthesizes Akbarian metaphysics with the Persian literary school of love, but he also demonstrates how Akbarian metaphysics, in one manner, hinges upon this direct, immediate, embodied ‘affect’ cultivated through poetry.
This dissertation ultimately moves towards inquiring as to whether the form and the hermeneutical role of the reader/listener lends to a distinct mode of knowing. The questions at play are as follows: If there is a distinct mode of knowing that emerges from the creative interplay of both form and the hermeneutical act of reader/listener, what is it? What epistemic implications does this way of knowing a ‘thing’ entail? Does the form—its lyrical meter, aesthetic, and use of literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, and personification (among others)—assert a power over the reader that departs from other ways of knowing?
I seek to answer this by turning the scholarly lens towards the relation between form and meaning and centering the listener/reader within this symbiotic interplay. Thus, rather than treating the ideas as static, I seek to foreground the listener/reader, and their role in making sense of – and being moved by – poetry.
