The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project was published on April 21st, 2020 by Columbia Global Reports. It’s about how Saudi Arabia’s ambitious 20th century proselytization campaign changed the Muslim world, as reported from Indonesia, Nigeria, Kosovo, and Saudi Arabia. A Kirkus starred review dubbed the book “riveting” and “thoroughly researched,” the Times Literary Supplement called it an “important new book” with “very valuable contributions,” and the Religion News Association selected it as one of its best books of the year. Excerpts were published in Foreign Affairs, The Guardian’s Long Read, and The Daily Beast. It’s available as a paperback, audiobook, and Kindle e-book. You can order it from your local independent bookstore, and, if you live outside the US and UK, Book Depository has free worldwide shipping.
Documenting the Chola Dynasty’s Inscriptional Past
I am working with my friend and Tamil scholar Tyler Richard to digitize and translate the inscriptions on the 1000+ stone temples of the medieval Chola dynasty in South India and Sri Lanka. Our work has been supported by the Explorer’s Club and Exodus Travels, and we completed our pilot project, at the Gangaikonda Cholapuram complex, in fall 2023. We are collaborating with a talented team at Tamil University in Thanjavur in order to publish an open-access website with translations of these inscriptions in modern Tamil and English, both for scholarly use and general interest.
From 2016 to 2019, I created and oversaw an annual artist “non-residency” for the literary magazine Nat. Brut. We activated communities and businesses in a series of metro areas so that one artist each year could work more broadly and deeply in their city in an era of increasing atomization and precarity. We ran the program and supported artists in New York, Kansas City, and Greensboro, and published their resulting work in the magazine.