ABOUT
I am a Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar at Yale University (NELC and Comparative Literature). In 2019, I received a joint PhD with distinction from the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and South Asian Languages and Civilizations. My research and teaching focus on literary cultures of South Asia and the Near East, with a particular interest in comparative literature, philosophy and literature, theories of literature, translation studies, and entangled early modernities. I work primarily with Persian, Urdu, Arabic, English, and Russian, and am committed to projects, both individual and collaborative, that bridge the studies of South Asian, Near Eastern, and European literary and intellectual cultures.
RESEARCH
In recent publications, I discuss representations of what I call fugitive experience in early modern Persian poetry; the Arabic concept of taste (dhawq) and seventeenth-century English thought; a geopolitical turn in seventeenth-century literary criticism; concepts of innovation, canonicity, and exile in Safavid and Mughal literary traditions; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for early modern Persian poets. My essays and translations have appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Journal of South Asian Intellectual History; Asymptote; and edited volumes.
My first book, Your Broken Colors: A Theory of Poetry and Fugitive Experience (in progress), reconstructs a premodern theory of poetry developed by poet-philosophers writing in Persian (many of whom also wrote in Arabic and Urdu) throughout early modern South Asia and the Near East. This theory, I argue, emerges from complex entwinements between poetry, philosophy, and devotional practices in the Islamicate world in early modernity. Intellectuals wrestled with questions about the human soul, the structure of the world, the nature of time, and the grounds of knowledge by turning to poetry, and the lyric genre in particular allowed them to reflect in new ways on the content, structure, and aims of inquiry. This book contributes to current debates about the value, work, and theory of poetry by engaging with a non-European archive of texts and theoretical perspectives.
My second book project, The Experiment of Lyric, uncovers remarkable parallels across early modern Eurasian poetry. I present a new history of experimentation, one that takes into account the wider transcultural amplitude of concepts like inquiry, discovery, and certitude. Writing contemporaneously (ca.1500-1800) in Persian, Urdu, English, and Russian, poets who labored as far away from each other as Shiraz, Delhi, London, and St. Petersburg experimented with philosophical, scientific, and religious ideas in lyric poetry. I show how these poets were imaginative co-inheritors of a shared set of traditions, receiving the ambitiously systematic methods, facts, and truths of their time in similarly experimental ways. Making the case that these traditions can—and should—be studied together, I argue that taking a creatively comparative Eurasia-wide view of lyric experimentation brings to light new ways of thinking about early modern poetry, philosophy, and science.
A third book project is Horizons of the Mind: Experiences of Self and World in Early Modern Persian and English Poetry, co-authored with Timothy M. Harrison. We construct a comparative history of mindedness by bringing together for the first time two philosophical poets—one from northern India, one from rural England—who both composed poetry that explores questions about the nature and structure of the human mind. Separated by a distance of more than 5,000 miles, Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) and Bidel of Delhi (1644–1720) were never in contact. They did not read each other’s works, and each poet lived with no knowledge of the other’s existence. And yet, Bidel and Traherne articulated strikingly similar ideas about mind, self, and world during many of the same orbital circuits that the earth made around the sun. We reveal how these two seemingly unconnected poets belonged to a shared intellectual world, one that was shaped by the philosophy of Ibn Sina (980–1037; known as Avicenna in Latin). Avicenna’s interventions in psychology, medicine, metaphysics, logic, and other fields circulated widely throughout Afro-Eurasia and beyond, transforming intellectual cultures across the globe. Tracing some of the branching pathways by which Avicenna’s ideas travelled to England and India, we argue that Traherne’s and Bidel’s explorations of mind and self belong to a shared world of ideas. We develop novel modes of comparison, reveal an Afro-Eurasian world of ideas hitherto overlooked by Euro-American scholarship, and provide a new account of the role played by poetry in early modern models of the mind.
In other essays, translations, and creative writing (drafted, under review, or in progress), I discuss Neoplatonism in seventeenth-century Eurasian poetry; the ethics of philology, with particular reference to early modern European and South Asian scholarship on “other” traditions; a theory of surfaces; Nabokov’s bilingualism; and microscale patterns of the mind in the early poetry of Osip Mandelstam.
My publications, listed here, can be found on my Academia page.
EDUCATION
PhD 2019 University of Chicago
Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
M.A. 2016 University of Chicago
Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Persian Literature, Sufism, Islamic Civilization)
M.A. 2015 University of Chicago
South Asian Languages and Civilizations (Literary Theory and Poetics, Sanskrit Literature and Poetics, Mughal History and Culture)
B.A. 2009 Columbia University
Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures (Major), Philosophy (Minor)
2006-2007 St. Petersburg State University, Russia
Oriental Studies Department, Persian Language and Literature
CONTACT
jane.mikkelson@yale.edu
