Alumna, Center for Middle Eastern Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow
Center for the History of the Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Thesis Title: Contours of Persianate Community, 1722-1835
|
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Engseng Ho Sunil Sharma Paul Losensky |
About
Generally: I am interested in the early modern and modern social and cultural history of the links between Western, Central and South Asia.
My dissertation explored migration, social networks and cultural exchange between these regions in an attempt to make sense of what being from a place meant before the rise of nationalism, in the context of a fracturing Persianate world. My chapters cover such things as the meaning of place in the context of the fall of the Safavids and the devolution of Mughal central power for migrants and travelers between Iran and India, the importance of origin, and the ways in which an ethics of social comportment and imaginings of self and community demonstrate a shared transregional culture that facilitated social belonging beyond parochial boundaries of place or religion.
My current project focuses on the ways in which culturally and historically specific notions of love and loyalty animate expressions and practices of friendship amongst different kinds of Persians in South Asia. My argument is that early modern Persianate forms of friendship (shared in part with West Asia) covered a wide range of social and political relationships that can provide more nuanced understandings of notions of self and the changing possibilities of community in the tumultuous mid-18th to early 19th centuries.
Futures projects will look at the ways in which 18th and early 19th century modes of of interactions and notions of belonging under went change during the mid-19th to early 20th century due to pressures of empire and nation. I am also interested in how continuing cultural and social links between South and West Asia figured in the constitution of colonial modernity. I have already gathering the majority of this research in London, Tehran, Delhi, Yangon and Mandalay.
Some day I also hope to write a regional history of Khurasan from the Timurid to Qajar period, as a way to explore transregional Persianate society and culture outside of the paradigms of centralized imperial states.
Contact Information
| Homepage: |
