He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and previously taught at the University of Edinburgh. He is the co-editor of Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony and the author of Culture and Hegemony in the Colonial Middle East. His interests lie in the nexus of normative moral and political ideals and literary representation in the modern Middle East. His current book project focuses on the role of aesthetic theory in Islamic political thought in the early to mid-twentieth century, and is entitled “Aesthetic Citizens, Islamic States”.