The Making of Persianate Modernity: Language and Literary History between Iran and India with Alexander Jabbari

The PATH Research Group presents a talk by Alexander Jabbari. Please join us in-person!

From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In his forthcoming book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.

Alexander Jabbari is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is a literary historian working at the intersections of literary studies, history, and philology. His current book project examines the emergence of literary history as a genre of writing in Persian and Urdu in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. More broadly, his research interests focus on intellectual and literary exchange between the Middle East and South Asia, literary modernization, nationalism, and sexuality. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature with a designated emphasis in Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine.

Contact: dlclevents [at] stanford.edu (dlclevents[at]stanford[dot]edu) Organized by Professor Alexander Key and Anna Galietti.