Persianate Worlds: A Symposium - Day One

April 18-19, 2025 The term “Persianate” was coined in the late 1960s by historian Marshall Hodgson and appeared in print for the first time in 1974 in his influential three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. He used it to conceptualize the region “from the Balkans to Bengal” that between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a particular form of political and literary flourishing afforded by the unprecedented material power of Islam and the aesthetic contributions of court cultures in the Ottoman, Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal empires of West, Central, and South Asia. The Persianate world was transregional and pluralistic in myriad ways, but it is often considered to have been unified at least in part by Persian literary culture, Persian social form and public decorum (adab), and most specifically the Persian language. Grown out of a special feature of PMLA edited by Pardis Dabashi, entitled “Persianate Words and Worlds,” this symposium will feature new work by scholars within and adjacent to Persianate studies. It will examine the field’s theoretical and historical foundations, as well as the new directions it has taken in recent years. What other languages, for instance, are scholars of the Persianate considering in their examinations of this transregional ecumene? What forms of ethnic, religious, and even national divisions characterized this vast region otherwise understood to have pre-dated the rise of the modern nation state and been held together by the Persian language? What are the cultural contours and literary afterlives of the so-called Persianate world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? And finally, what methods does this expansive field encourage, if not require, as it continues to grow and change?

DAY ONE SCHEDULE

9:00 to 9:30 a.m. – Breakfast

9:30 a.m.– Welcoming Remarks - Pardis Dabashi, Bryn Mawr College

9:35 a.m. –  Keynote Lecture – Mana Kia, Columbia University – “Is Another World Possible?: Notes on the Persianate Adab of the Economic”

11 a.m. to noon – Coffee Break

Noon to 1:30 p.m. – Panel 1: Beyond Familiarity and Unfamiliarity: Language, Culture, and Disciplinarity Catherine Ambler, University of Colorado, Boulder – “From Reconstruction to Co-construction: Can ‘Speaking Afresh’ (Tāza-Gū’ī) Speak the Persianate Afresh?” Atefeh Akbari, Barnard College – “Iranian Cinema and Persianate Futures” Alexander Jabbari, University of Minnesota – “Vernacular Philology in Persian” Discussant – Rubina Salikuddin, Bryn Mawr College

1:30 to 3 p.m.– Break

3 to 4:30 p.m. – Panel 2: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion: Axes of Difference within the Persianate Supriya Gandhi, Yale University – “Universality in Persianate Thought” Nicole Ferreira, University of California, Berkeley – “What Can Afghan History Tell Us About the Persianate? Lessons From the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” Manu Samriti Chander, Georgetown University – “Kant’s Persia” Discussant – Jamie Taylor, Bryn Mawr College

All symposium events will take place at Bryn Mawr College, Old Library, Room 224.

If you have any questions, please email Pardis Dabashi (pdabashi@brynmawr.edu) or Daniel Parker (dparker1@brynmawr.edu)

SEE DAY TWO EVENT HERE