Bio

I am a scholar of Islam focusing on the religious and intellectual culture in the middle periods. I am currently a Lecturer in Middle Eastern Studies (Formerly Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) at the University of Chicago where I teach courses on history and thesis writing. I received my PhD in 2020 from the Department of Near Eastern Languges and Civilizations also at the University of Chicago. My dissertation, completed under the supervision of Cornell Fleischer, examines the life and times of the Zayn al-Din Khwafi (d. 1435), a sufi from Herat whose work was an inspiration in the emergence of an international network of mystics and scholars from Cairo to Bursa and Herat.

Prior to this, I was a doctoral student at Bilkent University's History Department, where I  received an MA in Ottoman History under the late Ottomanist Halil Inalcik with a thesis on the social and economic study of the late seventeenth-century Istanbul.

In addition to my teaching and mentoring at the University of Chicago, I have taught courses on Islamic and Mediterranean history at Loyola University Chicago, University of Illinois Chicago, and at McCormick Theological Seminary. Topics I have taught include history of Islam and Christianity, world history, modern Middle East, and Chicago history.

Outside of academia, I have since long been interested in computer programming and design. I am an occasional contributor to font design projects, who regularly produces documents on LaTeX, which includes my dissertation--see my preamble here. More recently, I studied Data Science and Visualization at Northwestern University. See my Github profile here!