I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona (Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Professorship in Iranian Linguistics). I am a phonologist with a focus on rhythm and melody in language. More specifically, my main areas of research are poetic meter, intonation, stress, and the syntax-phonology interface. My research focuses mainly on the languages of the Middle East, especially those of the Iranian language family. I have worked on projects involving Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Sorani Kurdish, Pashto, Ossetian, and Mazandarani.

My research on poetic meter sits at the intersection between music and language. The question I try to answer is how and why 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 poetic tradition, relying on independently motivated rhythmic preferences. Part of my research focuses on the relationship between different quantitative metrical traditions, characterizing them as different parameterizations of a shared universal set of rhythmic constraints.

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

My name: In Persian, I pronounce my given name as [mohˈsen] and the two parts of my surname as [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].