Gennady Kurin

Gennady is a DPhil student at the Faculty of Oriental Studies whose research interests lie at the intersection of history, philology, and manuscript studies with a particular focus on West Asia. Prior to coming to Oxford, he received a BSc in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (2009), an MPhil in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Cambridge (2016) as well as spent three years pursuing a doctoral degree in history at the University of Maryland, College Park.

For his dissertation he is working on the first-person narrative of the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524-1576), often referred to as his autobiography, diary, or memoirs. Through the examination of the corpus of more than twenty manuscripts, produced over three centuries and stored in libraries in half a dozen countries, and by focusing on themes of historiography, instruction, and memory, he seeks to comprehensively study this textual tradition. Thereby, he hopes to add nuance to the scholarly understanding of the persona of the longest reigning monarch in Iran’s history as well as to shed light on how he came to be remembered by the subsequent Safavid generations.

Publications: 

Gennady Kurin (2021) “Ascertaining the Truth about the Religion and Ways of the Deifiers of ʿAlī”: The Qajar Elite and the Ahl-e Ḥaqq, Iranian Studies. DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2020.1855971

Kiessling, B. & Kurin, G. & Miller, M. T. & Smail, K. (2021) “Advances and Limitations in Open Source Arabic-Script OCR: A Case Study,” Digital Studies / Le champ numérique 11 (1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.8094