Publications

Valerie Hansen
2020
From celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a groundbreaking work of history showing that bold explorations and daring trade missions connected all of the world’s great societies for the first time at the end of the first millennium. People often believe that the years immediately prior to AD...
Abbas Amanat
2018
Editors: Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere is among the first books to explore the pre-modern and early modern historical ties among such diverse regions as Anatolia, the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, Western Xinjiang, the Indian subcontinent, and...
Abbas Amanat
2017
Charting the rise of modern Iran with Yale historian Abbas Amanat Abbas Amanat, the William Graham Sumner Professor of History at Yale, poured decades of research into “Iran: A Modern History,” his new book charting five centuries of Iranian history and its encounters with the neighboring lands and...
Alan Mikhail
2017
Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too,...
Kevin van Bladel
2017
This historical study argues that the Mandaean religion originated under Sasanid rule in the fifth century, not earlier as has been widely accepted. It analyzes primary sources in Syriac, Mandaic, and Arabic to clarify the early history of Mandaeism. This religion, along with several other, shorter...
Nahid Siamdoust
2017
Music was one of the first casualties of the Iranian Revolution. It was banned in 1979, but it quickly crept back into Iranian culture and politics. The state made use of music for its propaganda during the Iran–Iraq war. Over time music provided an important political space where artists and...
Travis Zadeh
2017
The story of the 9th-century caliphal mission from Baghdad to discover the legendary barrier against the apocalyptic nations of Gog and Magog mentioned in the Quran, has been either dismissed as superstition or treated as historical fact. By exploring the intellectual and literary history...