Approaching Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s): History, Philology, Palaeography, and Arts of the Book

*UPDATE: This seminar series will now take place online via Zoom. For registration details please contact mahroo.moosavi@balliol.ox.ac.uk or gennady.kurin@orinst.ox.ac.uk with a brief note about your level of classical Persian language.*

The Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre invites scholars and postgraduate students to participate in the upcoming seminar series: Approaching Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s): History, Philology, Palaeography, and Arts of the Book. The seminar series will take place online on a fortnightly basis starting from January 2022.

The seminar series are convened by Gennady Kurin and Dr Mahroo Moosavi and coordinated by the Oxford Nizami Ganjavi Centre, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.

Seminar Series Outline and Aims 

The archives of Persian manuscripts in libraries across the world are filled with the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s); these collections of texts cover a wide range of genres and themes and compile them in ways which have hardly been explored. These themes and genres include chancellery inshā, personal epistles, royal decrees, seals, contracts, occult texts, poetry, non-chancellery prose, tales, riddles, treatises on art, medical texts, cooking recipes, dream interpretations and much more. The Oxford Nizami Ganjavi seminar series: Approaching Safavid Majmū‘a(s) and Jung(s): History, Philology, Palaeography, and Arts of the Book will focus on several such collections, and a handful of texts contained within them,  while probing these on the historical, art-historical, urban, philological and literary aspects.

The seminar series will be particularly concerned with identifying and discussing potential methodologies through which this corpus may be approached, analysed, and studied. How and why were these texts collected, curated and assembled in such majmū‘a(s) and jung(s)? What do these mechanisms of assembly and production reveal about the psychological, cultural, religious, and political currents within the Safavid society? Where in memory and through what collective networks do these diverse, seemingly unrelated, and at times fragmentary texts may intersect? And finally, is it possible that the Safavid archive, allegedly destroyed by the Afghans during their occupation of Isfahan, may in fact be contained within these thousands of collections?  Through reading and translation of a selection of texts, drawn from several collections, and elaborating on questions outlined above, the seminar conveners hope to initiate scholarly discussion on the Safavid majmū‘a(s) and jung(s) and move it beyond the normative discourse.

Format

The meetings will take place via Zoom every two weeks, starting from Thursday January 20, 2022, 5-6:30 pm (GMT). 

Scholars and postgraduate students with upper-intermediate and/or advanced proficiency in classical Persian are welcome to join the seminar series.

For every session, a participant will volunteer to prepare a text, or an extract, from the pre-selected set of texts. The volunteers will be expected to read, transcribe, and translate the respective texts - to the extent they are able to - which will be followed by a group reading, analysis and discussion from historical, art-historical, literary, or any other potential perspectives. A week prior to the session, the participants will be provided with a PDF copy of the text and a limited number of key English and Persian articles relevant to the topic (These sources are recommended but not mandatory to read).

Registration

Participants are required to email mahroo.moosavi@balliol.ox.ac.uk or gennady.kurin@orinst.ox.ac.uk with a brief information on the level of their classical Persian language proficiency.