Sana Khan studies the social and intellectual history of the early Muslim communities (7th - 12th centuries). Her work explores how profanity in sex and desire manifests in poetry, particularly in genres of chaste love poetry, before and after the rise of the Ḥadīth movement. She is interested in how these changes coincide with the development of orthodoxy in Islamic theology. She is also interested in studying the differing treatment of profanity in the tafsīr, sīrah, and ḥadīth genres.

In 2021, Sana graduated with an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, where she completed a thesis under the advisement of Lara Harb and Ben Baer studying the trope of wandering in the earliest extant Arabic and Persian sources about Majnūn Laylā. In 2023, she earned an M.T.S. in Islamic Studies from Harvard University.