I am an Assistant Professor at the department of Linguistics in the University of Arizona (Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Professorship in Iranian Linguistics), working on the phonology of Iranian languages. My main areas of research are poetic meter, intonation, and the syntax-phonology interface.

My research on poetic meters is concerned with how certain arrangements of light and heavy syllables create metrically well-formed patterns in quantitative poetic traditions (e.g. those of Persian, Arabic, and Ancient Greek). I offer a formal model that accounts for what is metrical in the Persian metrical tradition, relying on independently motivated musical intuitions known through research on rhythm perception. Part of my research focuses on the relationship between different quantitative metrical traditions, characterizing them as different weight-assignment regimes to a shared universal set of rhythmic constraints.

My research on intonation mainly focuses on the interaction between syntax (and to a lesser extent, semantics and pragmatics) and word stress, both in cases where stress contrasts are neutralized (in Persian and many related languages) in certain intonational contexts and cases where stress assignment patterns within words seems to be sensitive to the larger intonational context.

My name: In Persian, I pronounce the three parts of my name as [mohˈsen], [mæhdæˈvi], and [mæzˈde]. In English, I don't mind as long as it's recognizable, but I usually go with something like this: [ˈmoʊsən ˈmɑdəvi ˈmæzdeɪ].