As a scholar of cultural, literary, gender, and sexuality studies, my research concerns the literature of the Middle East with a special focus on Persian and Armenian literature. Focusing on the members of gender, sexual, class, ethnic, and religious minoritized populations, I have examined topics ranging from the representation of social, sexual, and religious subalterns and transgressors in medieval Persian Sufi poetry to sigheh marriages (temporary marriages) and the stigmatized sigheh women in modern Iranian fiction and film to Iranian Armenian diasporic writers and artists and their sense of identity. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I engage with a broad array of sources from fiction, film, visual arts, and other forms of cultural production, ethnographic materials, and historical sources to feminist and literary theories. My main research methodology remains close reading of original texts and textual analysis.

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