The British Institue of Persian Studies presents

‘Persian Poetry on the High Seas: Migration and the Making of an Early Modern World Literature’

| 17 January 2024; 5PM |

Over the course of the 17th century, many hundreds of professional poets active in Persian travelled across the western Indian Ocean, moving between Safavid Iran, Mughal North India, the sultanates of the Deccan Plateau, Qasimi Yemen and Ottoman-controlled North Arabia. Wherever they journeyed, these writers managed to form bonds with the people that they encountered by composing and sharing poetry. This talk discusses why Persian poetry was such a successful tool for creating communities of shared interests and explores the impact of literary networks on the formation of shared political cultures.

James White studies late medieval and early modern Iran from a transregional perspective, examining how writers and their patrons used shared sets of cultural concepts to construct what scholars now call the Persianate World. His recent book, Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century, explores the agency of early modern writers who migrated between Iran, India and the Arabian Peninsula, forming a consciously globalising literary culture. He is currently Departmental Lecturer of Persian Studies at Oxford University, and previously held research and teaching roles at Cambridge, Oxford and FU Berlin.

To register:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3316977115841/WN_TA8x_w2_QqqL3JLa7p6wWw#/registration

For further details, see here.

Mansur Sefatgol (ed.), Bayāz of the Royal Chancellery of Iran during the Safavid Era: Draft, Register and Rules for Preparing Diplomatic Correspondences (A Study of Iran’s Foreign Relations with Europe, Ottoman, Mughals, and the Khanates of Central Asia),
Tokyo: Research and Information Center for Asian Studies, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo, 2023.
ISBN 978-4-903235-60-8

Download at:

https://repository.dl.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/records/2007610

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