Drugs, addiction, the body and the state.
Associate Professor of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities · Director of the Centre for Persian and Iranian Studies · University of Exeter
I am a writer, researcher and visual storyteller working on health and politics — the history and anthropology of drugs and addiction, and right-wing political culture in the Middle East.
I hold a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where I was based at St Antony’s College. I have written two books — Drugs Politics and, with Billie Jeanne Brownlee, States Without People — and I work in several languages: Arabic, Persian, Spanish, French, Italian and English. I founded and lead The Healthscapes Lab.
My aspiration is to be the Manu Chao of the academic and writing world — to move between places and rhythms, languages and genres, freely.
I was born in Arak, Iran, in July 1986, and moved to Italy at the age of seven — from Calabria to Mantova, and onwards. My academic life began in 2005 at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where I studied Arabic, Urdu and Persian and the history of the Islamicate world. Since then I have moved across many departments — International Relations, Area Studies, Medical History and Anthropology, Psychiatry and Medical Studies, and Development Studies.
Since finishing the doctorate in 2017, I have taught and researched at Oxford, Sciences Po (Paris and Menton), the EHESS, SOAS, Tehran University of Medical Sciences and the American University of Beirut.
Photographs and films made in the field.
Documentary
A photographic exhibition and video documentary drawn from a decade in Iran's remote 70 Peaks Valley, following Ali — a young shepherd who tended a vibrant online life he called majāzi, "the virtual." A meditation on connection, longing and the smartphone at the edge of the world.
Illustrated by Igort
Serialised in the historic Italian magazine Linus. It is July 2006, and Lebanon stands on the brink of another devastating war. After years apart, the fates of two old friends cross again — amid bombs, the drug trade, love and prison. Inspired by true stories, Nero Libanese tells of a friendship tested by life and by History, between the daily struggle to earn a few dollars and the extraordinary events of the Lebanese uprising and the blast at the port of Beirut. Will the friendship survive a world adrift?
Nero Libanese, illustrated by Igort — serialised in Linus, 2025.
Illustrated by Gianluca Costantini
Camillo is working on a cure for a new pathogen when Cuba’s leadership asks him to travel to Tehran. The two countries lie under total blockade and the constant threat of war, and he must work with an Iranian scientist, Anahita, to produce a biotech product capable of securing both nations’ health and political needs.
They could hardly be more different — Camillo faithful to the Cuban Revolution and Castro’s vision, Anahita convinced that Iran’s leadership is not for this era; one frugal and elegiac, the other hands-on, intuitive and wild. Their collaboration grows into a friendship that must withstand saboteurs within, foreign agents without, and troubles of their own making. Inspired by real events, Havana–Tehran is a tense drama of science, espionage and friendship — faith in human connection when trust itself is under siege. Can their science, and their friendship, survive against the odds?
Havana–Tehran, illustrated by Gianluca Costantini.
[ A few lines on your teaching and the areas in which you supervise — send them over and I'll set this. ]
The complete record — appointments, publications, grants and lectures.
Download CV (PDF) →
