He completed his PhD in 2005 in the Departments of History and Middle East and Islamic Studies at New York University. His intellectual and scholarly preoccupations these days are with concepts of sovereignty that extend from the subject to the state, from political theology and mysticism to governmentality. "It is hard to surmise whether much of the reaction to Iranian cinema abroad stemmed from the fact that it was cinema about Iran, or was due to its groundbreaking cinematographic methods"