Sinem Arcak Casale, "Gifts in the Age of Empire: Ottoman-Safavid Cultural Exchange, 1500–1639" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
When the Safavid dynasty, founded in 1501, built a state that championed Iranian identity and Twelver Shi’ism, it prompted the more established Ottoman Empire to align itself definitively with Sunni l...
31 Mars 20251h 8min
Parisa Vaziri, "Racial Blackness and Indian Ocean Slavery: Iran's Cinematic Archive" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)
From the East African and Red Sea coasts to the Persian Gulf ports of Bushihr, Kish, and Hurmuz, sailing and caravan networks supplied Iran and the surrounding regions with African slave labor from an...
9 Feb 20251h 24min
Jorge Flores, "Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Portuguese India was tiny—a handful of trading posts and enclaves, centered on the colony of Goa. The Estado da Índia faced the Mughal Empire and the Deccan Sultanates, large Muslim and Persian-based ...
29 Jan 202554min
Samuel Hodgkin, "Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Per...
12 Dec 20241h
Tristan A. Volpe, "Leveraging Latency: How the Weak Compel the Strong with Nuclear Technology" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Over the last seven decades, some states successfully leveraged the threat of acquiring atomic weapons to compel concessions from superpowers. For many others, however, this coercive gambit failed to ...
8 Dec 20241h 9min
Arash Azizi, "What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom" (Oneworld, 2024)
On Tuesday 13 September 2022, all Mahsa Amini has planned is a day shopping in Tehran. Her birthday is next week. But she is arrested as she comes out of the subway – the Guidance Patrol deem her hija...
23 Okt 202456min
Emrah Yildiz, "Zainab's Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders" (U California Press, 2024)
Emrah Yildiz's new book Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others Across Borders (University of California Press, 2024) is a masterful ethnographic study that maps the religious, political, ...
22 Okt 20241h 10min
Julia Caterina Hartley, "Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France" (Bloomsbury. 2023)
Today I talked to Julia Caterina Hartley about Iran and French Orientalism: Persia in the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-Century France (Bloomsbury. 2023). New translations of Persian literature into ...
2 Okt 202442min
