Friday, January 31, 2025, 5:00pm
Barker Center, Room 133 (Plimpton Room)
Abstract
What does it mean to be both embodied and ensouled? In the Persianate world, questions about the compound nature of creaturely existence spurred inquiry across disciplines for centuries. How does the soul come to know itself? What does the body know? This talk reconstructs one style of approach to such questions by reading early modern Persian poetry in dialogue with contemporaneous prose works on medical science, revealing how in this period different disciplines—medicine, psychology, poetry—form a coordinated pursuit of knowledge that ranges across material and immaterial domains alike.
About the Speaker
Jane Mikkelson is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She earned a joint PhD in South Asian and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago in 2019 and taught at the University of Virginia before joining Yale. She specializes in the literary and intellectual cultures of South Asia and the Near East, working primarily with classical Persian, as well as Urdu and Arabic; newer projects include Russian and English as well. Her research focuses on forms of thought, methods of inquiry, and varieties of experience that are made possible by imaginative literature. Recent publications discuss planetary poetics; the Arabic concept of taste (dhawq) and seventeenth-century English thought; a geopolitical turn in literary criticism; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for Persian poets. Her current book project investigates how poetry shaped new kinds of inquiry across disciplines in the early modern Persianate world. Other ongoing projects, both individual and co-authored, aim to bridge the studies of South Asian, Near Eastern, and European cultures through comparison and collaboration.
Sponsors:
The Mahindra Humanities Center &
the Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies
https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/persian-and-persianate-studies