I was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and received a BA (Hons) in History from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in 2014. I then went on to finish an MA in Middle Eastern Studies in 2016 and a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC) in 2022, both from the University of Chicago.

I am an intellectual and cultural historian of religion in the early modern Ottoman Empire and my research lies at the intersections of sainthood, sacred kingship, embodied religion, and material culture from the 16th to the 18th century. My current book project, titled Arrangements of the Sacred: Bodies, Objects, and the Making of Ottoman Islam, explores the transformation of early modern Ottoman religio-political and religio-social thought and practice between the late 16th and early 18th century. In it I show how, in this pivotal period characterized by manifold crises and seismic social change in the Ottoman Empire, an increased preoccupation with mystical-occult forms of embodied religion manifested itself at the level of the court in Istanbul, as well as at the level of broader Ottoman society in the Anatolian and Balkan provinces.

I analyze devotional poetry, hagiographies, prayer books, talismanic objects, and even accounts of a sultan's visions and dreams to tell a new story about the particularities and development of Ottoman Islam in the long 17th century.