Associate Professor of Classical Studies
About
As an intellectual historian, with training in Classical Studies, I’m broadly interested in how scientific knowledge is theorized and disciplined in both pre-modern and modern societies, especially in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean and Middle East. My literary training and developing interest in science communication has made me particularly attentive to the rhetoric of science: how it bolsters its epistemic credentials (or truth content) through its use of concise language. I’m ultimately fascinated by how ancient and modern sciences present themselves as objective.
My first book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2020; winner of the Charles winner of the SCS 2021 Goodwin Award of Merit; translated into Turkish and Arabic) examined how Greco-Roman and medieval Arabophone authors appealed to the cosmic vision of Plato’s Timaeus, which regards the human body, soul and broader natural reality as homologous, to reimagine the categories of medical and philosophical knowledge. I situate this textual engagement within a larger history of disciplinary boundary policing, which continues to this today.
My second, in-progress monograph, Greek Science and Semitic Secularisms: Greco-Arabic Studies in the 20th-Century, looks critically at germinal historiographies of the medieval Greco/Syriac-Arabic translation movement that were produced around War World II. Through careful archival work, I argue that certain influential Jewish and Muslim Orientalist found in this historical phenomenon a means to contest their exclusion from European life by associating ‘Semitic’ culture with a privileged perspective on the Hellenic foundations of ‘western’ culture. My study offers a more agential framework for ‘orientalized’ individuals than standard critiques of Orientalism; it also foregrounds the secularist discourse of both traditional ‘Saidian’ Orientalism as well as these counter-Orientalisms.
In addition to comparative projects on philosophy and science, as an academic translator myself, I’m delighted to discuss critical translation theory and emancipatory philological methods.
