A Concept of Geographical Space and its Career in Persian Literature

Date: 

Friday, September 7, 2018, 5:00pm

Location: 

Room 133, Barker Center (12 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA 02138)
Mahindra Humanities Center
Persian and Persianate Studies
presents
 
The Perfect Equilibrium
 
Christine Nölle-Karimi,
Austrian Academy of Sciences
The Perfect Equilibrium: A Concept of Geographical Space and its Career in Persian Literature
 
Abstract:
Pre-Mongol authors drew on a repertoire of cosmological, genealogical and anthropomorphic concepts to describe the world. Among these, the model of a seven-fold division of the inhabited world, which derived from the fruitful encounter of Pre-Islamic Iranian and Greek models, proved to be most enduring. This presentation explores the ways in which the notion of climes or zones manifested in the literature from the 12th to the 19th century. Of focal interest will be the central, fourth clime that came to be equated with the core of Iranian history and Persianate achievement.
 
Christine Nölle-Karimi completed her PhD in Near Eastern Studies at U.C. Berkeley in 1995. Between 1997 and 2008 she worked as an instructor and scientist at the Department of Iranian Studies at the Otto-Friedrich-University in Bamberg and at the Institute for the Near and Middle East at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. She obtained the venia legendi in Iranian Studies in 2009 and an extraordinary professorship at Bamberg University in 2017. Since October 2009, she has been working as a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Iranian Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Her publications demonstrate her wide range of interests, from Persian historiography and the history of mentalities in early modern and modern times to issues of modern state building in Iran and Afghanistan and Persophone literary history. Her major publications include State and Tribe in Nineteenth-Century Afghanistan (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997), The Pearl in its Midst: Herat and the Mapping of Khorasan from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries (Wien: Verlag der ÖAW, 2014), “Afghan Polities and the Indo-Persian Literary Realm: The Durrani Rulers and Their Portrayal in Eighteenth-Century Historiography,” in: Nile Green (ed.), Afghan History through Afghan Eyes (London, Hurst, 2015, 53-77), and “On the Edge: Eastern Khurasan in the Perception of Qajar Officials, in: Eurasian Studies 14/ 2016, 135-177.
 
Sponsors: the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, the Mahindra Humanities Center & the Aga Khan Fund for Iranian Studies
 
 
|| If you or an event participant require disability-related accommodations please contact nelc@fas.harvard.edu ||