Welcome, friend! We know 39 other open tabs on your browser are competing for your attention, so thanks for being here. Aria is a scholar of Persian literature and translation studies, a community organizer, a failing comedian, and an immigration rights advocate. Aria's classroom is a place of laughter and reflection in which students embrace the power of humanistic inquiry to build community and genuine hope (with minimal reliance on brujería outside of class). Whenever despair gets him down, Aria draws on the legacy of his student Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi whose courage and dedication to universal human rights transformed her community and the world. 

To honor her legacy, Aria has helped establish a memorial lecture series that highlights unapologetically feminist, fiercely anti-colonial, public-facing work in the domains of academia, journalism, creative writing, cinema, and social advocacy. Past speakers in the series include Emek Ergun, Mediha Sorma, and Hannah Moushabeck. Previously housed at the Jackson School’s Middle East Center, the Ayşenur memorial lecture now lives on the streets of Seattle, in its bookstores, public squares, and cafes. Ayşenur no se murió, sino que se multiplicó. Reach out to Aria if you’d like to be informed, or better, involved.  

Aria's first book, Reading across Borders: Afghans, Iranians, and Literary Nationalism, the winner of the ACLA’s 2025 René Wellek Prize for the Best Monograph in Comparative Literature, was published by the University of Texas Press in 2024. The book details the dynamic and interconnected ways Afghans and Iranians invented their modern selves through new ideas about literature (adabiyāt). Reading across Borders is available in both Iran (through a Persian translation published by Shirazeh Press) and India (Sanctum Books, New Delhi).

Translation, its study and practice, constitute a crucial part of Aria’s life, research, teaching, and advocacy for diversity and equity. In 2022, he established the Mo Habib Translation Prize in Persian Literature at the UW, an initiative that brings contemporary works of Persian literature from Iran, Afghanistan, and their diasporas to a wider (i.e. more than area studies) readership. Published by Deep Vellum in March 2026, Reza Ghassemi’s Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime, in Michelle Quay’s translation, was the inaugural winner of the prize. The winner of the second cycle is Wounded Vita Nuda, a collection of poems by Maral Taheri, translated by Hajar Hussaini, due for publication in autumn 2027. 

For the past four years, Aria has been co-convening the Translation Studies Hub, a scholarly platform dedicated to theoretical, pedagogical, and practical conversations on translation. Previously funded for six cycles by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, TS Hub now continues its work primarily by organizing an annual residency in literary translation each spring as well as seeking to create an advanced certificate and minor in translation studies at the UW. 

With Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Aria is the co-translator of Shape of Extinction, a book-length collection of Bijan Jalali’s short, meditative poems. Published by Asemana Books, a dynamic and independent publisher in Toronto, Shape of Extinction was the recipient of the 2026 Lois Roth Translation Prize in the category for Persian poetry. 

In 2024, Aria helped to create the Iraj Khademi Residency in Persian Literature. Now in its third cycle, the residency honors the loving memory of Dr. Iraj Khademi who dedicated three decades of his storied life to building a community centered on the love of song and poetry. While this residency will never fill the hole his passing left in our community, it furthers a cause that was dear to his heart: bringing Persian literature to readers across generations and nationalities. 

Since 2017, Aria has been working with and advocating for non-citizen Americans from Mexico and Central America who have historically been vulnerable to the fascist ebbs and flows of American politics. Aria deeply cherishes his relationship with his Latin American community and enjoys traveling in and learning about the region through its own journalistic, scholarly, and literary voices. He may have been born and raised in Iran and opted later to immigrate (against his better judgement) to the US, but Aria's soul belongs to México. 

To maintain a modicum of sanity, Aria clings onto his identity as an ambivalent academic (AA) given that the university remains increasingly complicit in systems of exploitation and violence at home and abroad. And it is flamboyantly shameless about how it is implicated in a capitalist web of domination. The classroom is Aria’s (and our) last frontier where the educator and students ought to bring a wide range of emotions to make sense of a decaying economic system and imagine better and more equitable futures. One question remains: Is Aria the poster child for Fox News’s longstanding segment on “radical professors” who “hate our (imperialist) freedoms”? Take one of his classes to find out. 

P.S. Aria is proud to have his dedicated profile on the doxxing platform Canary Mission.