You are kindly invited to the seminar titled as “The Concept of the Persianate: What it can and cannot tell us!” organised by the Department of History.
Date: 05 December 2024, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130
Title: The Concept of the Persianate: What it can and cannot tell us!
Speaker: Evrim Binbaş, University of Bonn
Bio:
Evrim Binbaş received his PhD degree from the University of Chicago. After seven years at Royal Holloway, University of London, he moved to the Institute of Oriental and Asian Studies at the University of Bonn. He studies early modern Islamic history with a particular focus on the Timurid and Turkmen dynasties in the fifteenth century. His first book on the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi (d. 1454) was published by Cambridge University Press (Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters). Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran shared the 2017 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize in Middle Eastern Studies and the 2018 Association for Iranian Studies Said Sirjani Book Prize Honorable Mention Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2017 Gladstone Prize by the Royal Historical Society in Britain, and for the 2017-2018 Book of the Year Award in Iranian Studies by the National Library and Archives of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently Evrim is working on three different book projects. Together with John E. Woods of the University of Chicago, he is preparing a critical edition of Yazdi’s Zayl-i Zafarnama, which is the second and so-far unpublished volume of the Zafarnama. He is also editing, again together with John E. Woods, a handbook on the Timurid dynasty titled The Timurid Dynasty: A Handbook. This book was commissioned by Brill in Leiden, and when it is published, it will include contributions from more than thirty scholars working on early modern Islamic history. Finally, he is preparing a monograph on the modalities of sovereignty. In his new monograph, Binbaş highlights the non-monarchical and divided forms of sovereignty in the early modern Islamic world. He is also managing a DFG-Funded research project on genealogical trees written in Turkish, Persian, and Arabic between 1500 and 1922.
Abstract:
Although the concept of the Persianate has been around at least since 1974, when the Chicago historian Marshall G.S. Hodgson defined it as a cultural orientation based on the prestige of the Persian language and Iranian history peculiar to medieval and early modern Middle Eastern and Islamic history, it has gained immense popularity in the last two decades. There is now a professional organization dedicated to the study of “Persianate societies,” and there are at least two separate collected volumes on the definition of the term. Yet, this popularity has brought us also the confusion about the exact meaning of the term. As a result, scholars working in neighboring disciplines, such as Ottoman and Turkish literature, Chaghatay literature, South Asian studies, and Arabic literature, are reluctant to engage with the discipline of Persianate studies. In my presentation, I will discuss the origins of the term “Persianate” and present an overview of how it evolved since the 1970s. At the end of my presentation, I will make specific suggestions on how to open up the field of Persianate studies to a broader scholarly public working on Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures and literatures.