He researches the role of language in how identities and ideologies are constructed, negotiated, and developed. He focuses on the language used in diasporic contexts and on social media. His research is primarily ethnographic and comes particularly from the community of Iranian Azerbaijanis, an understudied, minoritized group in Iran. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language in Society, and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He is currently co-authoring a monograph called Chronotopes and Migration: Language, Social Imagination, and Behavior. He received a PhD in linguistics with a specialization in sociolinguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.