Originally from Tehran, living in Brooklyn, NYC, I teach at the department of Liberal Studies, New York University as an adjunct assistant professor. I hold a Ph.D. in the humanities from the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature (formerly The Humanities Center, founded in the wake of 1966 Structuralist Symposium at JHU) in a run of study that focused on modern German thought, aesthetic theory, and post-Hegelian, Marxist political thought. In a decades-long parallel practice, I have translated, within a collective project I helped create back home, works into Farsi from the tradition of critical theory, in particular by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin.
Schooled primarily in the Frankfurt School Critical Theory, much of my work over the past two decades has revolved around the intersection of two fields of inquiry, or methods of understanding modern bourgeois capitalist society: historical materialism and absolute idealism. Because of the many tensions between the two methods of understanding bourgeois-capitalist society since the late eighteenth century, which I examine in multiple fields as facing conflicts, the central concept that I have worked with is antinomy. As my first monograph in English, this work will be published at Brill this year in the Historical Materialism Book Series. The two current projects I am woking on ask about the aesthetic and political consequences of a changing image of nature in the ‘Anthropocene’ and, more recently, the idea of pedagogy after Gaza.