His work is situated at the juncture between global intellectual history and ethnic studies. He has worked on the development of dislocative nationalism in Iran in the period 1860–1979, focusing on the hybridisation of European ideas of nation and race by Iranian intellectuals. Currently, his research centers on a parallel study of antisemitism and Islamophobia from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The incidence of conspiracy thinking on strategies of racialisation is at the heart of this new research agenda.