Nicholas Boylston (On Leave)

Nicholas Boylston is a scholar of classical Persian literature and Persianate Islam. His current research focuses on the intersection between intellectual and literary history in the 11th-13th centuries CE. He is currently completing a book on meaning and wonder as lenses for interpreting Persian Sufi poetry in its formative phase. He also studies the interactions between Twelver Shiʿism and Sufism in Persianate literary Quran commentaries. He received his BA from Harvard College, his MA from the University of Tehran, and his PhD from Georgetown University (2017). He was previously College Fellow and Lecturer at Harvard (2018-21) and Assistant Professor at Seattle University (2021-3).

His publications include: “Quranic Exegesis at the Confluence of Twelver Shiʿism and Sufism: Sayyid Ḥaydar Āmulī’s al-Muḥīṭ al-a‘ẓam (The Greatest Ocean).” The Journal of Qur’anic Studies, 23(1), 2020, 1–35. “Islam from the Inside Out: ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s Destruction and Reconstruction of Islam as Vector.” Journal of Islamic Studies, 32(2), May 2021, 161–202. “Speaking the Secrets of Sanctity in the Tafsīr of Ṣafī ‘Alī Shāh” in Approaches to the Qur'an in Contemporary Iran, ed. Alessandro Cancian, Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the institute of Ismaili Studies, 2019, 243-70.