Comparative Persianate Aesthetics Symposium

Our symposium will focus on the changing relationship that literary and historical texts and paintings had to Persian cosmopolitan models in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and how they themselves became starting points for distinctive traditions that drew inspiration from local and regionally-specific cultural practices, including the non-courtly. We will also examine the ways in which vernacular production in turn transformed Persian culture. We will approach this topic through a variety of conceptual frameworks: translation, imitation, hybridity, and innovation, across various humanistic disciplines. Individual papers will discuss textual genres such as epic and love lyrics, images in illustrated manuscripts and albums, practices and performances, in their cultural contexts, but also comparatively. Participants: Amr Ahmed (Harvard University) Chanchal Dadlani (Wake Forest University) Subah Dayal (Tulane University) Farshid Emami (Oberlin College) Emine Fetvaci (Boston University) Thibaut d’Hubert (University of Chicago) Sooyong Kim (Koc University) Selim Kuru (University of Washington, Seattle) Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University) Sunil Sharma (Boston University) Sponsored by the Department of World Languages and Literatures, Department of History of Art and Architecture, BU Center for the Humanities, Center for the Study of Asia, and the Institute for the Study of Muslim Societies and Civilizations