Selected publications

I try to post links to all of my publications, and copies of some, on ORCID, Google Scholar, and Academia.edu. The idea here is simply to feature a few papers.

“Nasr Allah Munshi’s Preface to Kalila and Dimna,” An Unruly Classic: Kalila and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (2024), 181–212.

This chapter presents, for the first time, an unabridged and fairly literal English translation of the preface that Abu l‑Ma‘ali Nasr Allah Munshi added to his adaptation of Kalila and Dimna, written ca. 540/1146. Nasr Allah was a secretary (munshi) at the Ghaznavid court, serving the sultan Bahramshah (r. 511–52/1117–57), and he made the fateful decision to write a Persian translation of Kalila and Dimna from a copy of the Arabic version attributed to Ibn al‑Muqaffa‘ (d. ca. 139/756–57), which a friend had given to him. The result is a text nearly as idiosyncratic as it is historically significant—one of the few most influential works of Persian belletristic prose from the pre-Timurid period.

“Paths Crossing in Damascus: Familiarity with Persian among Eleventh/Seventeenth-Century Arabic Literati,” Philological Encounters 7, nos. 3–4 (2022): 238–67.

This article explores the phenomenon of familiarity with Persian among Arabic literati of the early modern period, with a focus on the eleventh/seventeenth century. It has long been recognized, in a general sense, that some scholars from the Ottoman Arab world had knowledge of Persian literature. Only recently have we seen the beginnings of detailed research on this topic. In the current article, the works of four authors are examined with an eye toward their discussion of things Persian or Iranian: Muhammad Amin al‑Muhibbi (d. 1111/1699), Shihab al‑Din al‑Khafaji (d. 1069/1659), Hasan al‑Burini (d. 1024/1615), and ‘Abd al‑Ghani al‑Nabulusi (d. 1143/1731). We find that, although familiarity with Persian was far from unheard-of in Arabic literary circles, the degree of interest varied widely. It also becomes clearer through this study that Ottoman Damascus was a place in which Persian could be learned, given the number of migrants and visitors from the Persianate realm and the wide circulation of texts.

“Tazkirah‑i Khayr al‑bayan: The Earliest Source on the Career and Poetry of Sa’ib Tabrizi (d. ca. 1087/1676),” Al‑‘Usur al‑Wusta 24 (2016): 114–38.

In this article, I describe a source which represents by far our earliest documentation of the career and poetry of Sa’ib Tabrizi (d. ca. 1087/1676), and which has gone largely unaddressed in scholarship. It occurs in a still-unpublished biographical dictionary (tazkirah) of poets titled Khayr al‑bayan, written by Malik Shah Husayn Sistani and known to survive in several manuscripts. The oldest, and possibly the only complete copy, is MS Or. 3397 at the British Library. Shah Husayn wrote this tazkirah between 1017/1608–09 and 1036/1627; the section containing the notice on Sa’ib was added in 1035/1625–26. Significantly, Or. 3397 was copied in 1041/1631 by a scribe named Muhammad Mirak ibn Khwajah Mir Farahi. This means that the text of the passage on Sa’ib dates to shortly after his emigration to Kabul (thence to India) in 1034/1624–25, while our manuscript dates to shortly before he left Kashmir to return to Iran in 1042/1632. The source thus falls entirely within the period of young Sa’ib’s seven-year adventure on the Indian subcontinent, and represents a rare vignette of the beginning of an illustrious career.

“The Biography of Vahshi Bafqi (d. 991/1583) and the Tazkera Tradition,” Journal of Persianate Studies 8, no. 2 (2015): 195–222.

This paper focuses on Vahshi Bafqi (d. 991/1583), especially on the sources for the study of his biography and works. The various editions of his collected poems are assessed. Next, all of the known early sources on Vahshi’s biography are presented, including a very important one that has not been published or cited before. Laying out all of these sources allows us to construct a more authoritative biography of the poet than has appeared to date. On a broader level, we learn that the careers and works of poets of Vahshi’s era are best understood in connection to one another. The tremendous growth of the tazkera genre in the Safavid-Mughal period makes possible this kind of research, focused on interconnectivity and cosmopolitanism in literary culture. In fact, the sources not only permit such an approach; they demand it. The paper ends with a series of recommendations for future research on Vahshi, his contemporaries, and the tazkeras themselves.