CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar: Iranian 250

Shahzad Bashir (Brown University)
“The Market in Poetry in the Persian World”

The discussion will focus on Professor Bashir’s book The Market in Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge UP, 2021), which treats poetic utterances as objects of material value sought by those with power and resources. The book provides a sense for the texture of the Persian world by discussing what made poetry precious and a carrier of social relations, political and religious authority, economic exchange, and the articulation of gender. At the broadest level, this work substantiates the interdependency between cultural and material reproduction of society.

Shahzad Bashir is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He has published extensively on various topics, including, most recently, the digital book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022). He is an Associate Editor of the journal History and Theory, edits the book series Islamic Humanities (University of California Press), and co-edits the book series Islamicate Intellectual History (Brill).

Iranian 250, “Persian Literature in English Translation: Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,”  taught by Associate Professor Domenico Ingenito (NELC), offers a survey of medieval and early modern Persian literature in English translation. The seminar fosters interdisciplinary conversations among graduate students from a plurality of departments and programs, including Islamic Studies, Gender Studies, History, Art History, Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies, English, and Comparative Literature. All sessions will be held in English, and students with no prior knowledge of Persian are welcome to enroll. Twice a month, international scholars will deliver lectures focusing on their current research trajectories. Key topics: epics and ethnic identity, philosophical poetics and occasion, mysticism and performative queerness, Judeo-Islamic literary intersections, ideals of beauty and lyric performance, literary modernity from Ottoman Turkey to Moghul India, German romantic and modernist appropriations of the Persian poetic canon, etc. In collaboration with the UCLA Program of Iranian Studies.

Thursday, May 26 at 9:00 am Pacific Time

Register here for online attendance on Zoom.

Image: Painting from Baysunghur’s manuscript of Sa’di’s Gulistan, Herat. Chester Beatty Library, Dublin.