Bryn Mawr Assistant Professor of English Pardis Dabashi is bringing together a host of scholars for “Persianate Worlds,” a two-day symposium that will feature new work by scholars within and adjacent to Persianate studies.
The symposium takes place at Bryn Mawr on April 18-19. It grew out of a special feature of the journal Publication of the Modern Language Association of America edited by Dabashi.
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.
“It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring this outstanding group of scholars to Bryn Mawr College. A mixture of emerging voices in the field of Persianate studies and world-renowned scholars who helped establish it and shape its contours, the participants in the Persianate Worlds symposium provide an example of the pathbreaking transdisciplinary scholarship being done today on the Persianate world and its afterlives,” says Dabashi.
In addition to Dabashi, Bryn Mawr faculty members participating in the symposium are Rubina Salikuddin, an assistant professor and director of Bryn Mawr College’s Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies (MECANA) Program, and Professor of Literatures in English Jamie Taylor.
Dabashi’s scholarship examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism, as well as the epistemology, experience, and practice of aesthetic criticism. She teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory. Dabashi is especially interested in how aesthetic and rhetorical form index or trouble stances of political and epistemic certainty, which she explores by examining structures of feeling such as ambivalence and doubt.
Salikuddin is a historian of late medieval and early modern Iran and Central Asia, and her work centers on figuring out what life looked like for people living in this period, how they saw their place in both their communities and in the larger world, and how they constructed an ideal of a life properly lived. To this end, she has focused on religious and cultural production in Iran and Central Asia in the 14th to 16th centuries. Her research is fundamentally motivated by core questions of relevance across the breadth and depth of human experience with a particular focus on recuperating the historicity of the subaltern and those on the margins of history. She teaches courses on medieval, early modern, and modern history of the Middle East and Central Asia, with a particular focus on medieval and early modern Iran and Central Asia, and is working on a book about medieval notions of the sacred.
Taylor’s research specializes in the literature and culture of medieval England. Her research and teaching focus on medieval law, cultural history, and a global Middle Ages. Her course The Global Middle Ages offers students an introduction to the medieval period as a time of active cultural exchange, racial imaginaries, and decentralized globality. The class explores what it means to think about history on a global scale, how to broaden an understanding of the Middle Ages without replicating Eurocentric perspectives, and how literary texts work to mediate history instead of merely reflecting it.