I'm currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, and holder of the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies.
My research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies. Although my training was largely in philology and dialectology, I’ve developed interests in a number of other fields and methodologies, including codicology, postcolonialism, and aural/sonic studies. More straightforwardly, the two main fields I work in are Iranian Studies (particularly philology of Middle Iranian languages) and Arabic Linguistics (particularly dialectology).
The languages I work with and/or teach include the following. Iranian: Sogdian, Chorasmian, Middle Persian, Bactrian, Old Persian, Avestan, Parthian, and Yaghnobi. Arabic: Libyan and northern African generally. Of all these, I regard Sogdian and Libyan Arabic as my main specialties. I also have started doing some work on languages of the Sahara, including Tuareg and most recently Tebu.
I studied at USC and SOAS. Before coming (back) to the US, I worked in Germany for several years as a researcher at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Freie Universität Berlin.
I post (mostly bibliographically) on Libya-related matters at The Silphium Gatherer.
My collection of Libyan vinyl records is documented sporadically at my LibyanVinyl project.