Kamila Akhmedjanova

College:

St Antony’s College

Thesis Title:

‘A study of Ahmad Dānish’s legacy within the context of late 19th-century Persian-speaking intellectual trends’.

Supervisors:

Professor Edmund Herzig, Professor Dominic Parviz Brookshaw

Educational background:

DPhil in Oriental Studies, University of Oxford (currently)
MA, University of Oxford
MSt in Oriental Studies, University of Oxford
MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, University of Oxford
BA in Modern Languages (Italian) and Linguistics, University of Oxford

Biography:

Before coming to the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, I completed my BA and MPhil degrees at the University of Oxford, having previously specialized in Italian literature and general linguistics. I also hold an MSt in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

I took part in various academic conferences, including, most recently, conferences of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS), the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS), the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) and of the Italian Association for the Study of Central Asia and the Caucasus (ASIAC). I published several academic articles, covering topics related to the 19th-century Persian-speaking intellectual trends, as well as to the methodology of teaching Tajik dialect of Persian. My first article was dedicated to the study of double past participle forms in the Sicilian dialects, while my most recent published article is dedicated to the interplay of literature and politics in the works of Sadriddin Ayni, a famous Soviet Tajik writer. In addition, one of my forthcoming articles explores the image of Persia in Russian literature.

I have experience of teaching Tajik dialect of Persian to undergraduate students, as well as of co-supervising undergraduate dissertations. I also taught classes dedicated to Ahmad Dānish’s texts. I act as a Teaching Assistant for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at the University of Oxford.

Research interests:

Intellectual history of the Persian-speaking world; Ahmad Dānish’s intellectual and literary legacy; other 19^th-century Persian-speaking intellectuals, including Mirza Fatali Akhundzade, Mahmud Tarzi and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani; history of Central Asia and Iran in the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries; Persian literature (including works produced in both Tajik, i.e. Cyrillic, and Persian scripts)

Recent publications:

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2026. ‘Central Asian Progressive Thinker of the End of the 19th Century: Analysis of Ahmad Dānish’s Intellectual Legacy’. Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2025. ‘The Image of Persia in the Works of Ivan Bunin, Nikolaǐ Gumilëv and Sergeǐ Esenin’. Forum for Modern Language Studies (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2025. ‘Sadriddīn ‘Aynī’s and Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s Influence on the Creation of Modern Tajik National and Cultural Identity in the 20th Century’. In Tajiks – The People of Khurasan: Their History and Culture (forthcoming).

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2025. ‘Literature and Politics in Early Soviet Central Asia: Case Study of Sadriddin Aini’s Odina and Margi sudkhūr’. The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 52.1, pp. 98-124, DOI: 10.30965/18763324-bja10112.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2024. ‘Trends in Intellectual Life in Central Asia in the 19th Century (Based on the Works of Nādira, Dilshād Barnā and Ahmad Dānish)’. Oriens, 1, pp. 210-221.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2023. ‘Reanalysis of the Role that Western Ideas Played in the Development of the Ideology of Progressive Persian-speaking Philosophers of the 19th Century’. History of Oriental Studies: Traditions and Modernity, 2, pp. 60-69.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2021. ‘Teaching Tajiki language to Undergraduate Students with a Prior Knowledge of Farsi’. The Magic of Innovation: Language and Language Teaching in a Changing Environment, pp. 271-276. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘MGIMO-Universitet’.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2020. ‘Double Past Participle Forms in the Sicilian Dialects’. Typology of Morphosyntactic Parameters, 3.1, pp. 11-33.

Translations and projects

Arnaldi, Marta. 2024. ‘Новый переводческий подход к нарративной медицине: исследование книги Маргериты Гвидаччи Neurosuite’ [‘The Translational Turn in Narrative Medicine: A Study of Margherita Guidacci’s Neurosuite’]. Translated by Kamila Akhmedjanova. Encounters in Translation, 2, DOI: 10.35562/encounters-in-translation.609.

Akhmedjanova, Kamila. 2022. ‘Translation of Duchêne (Tajikistan)’. Soviet Central Asia in 100 Objects, https://www.cabinet.ox.ac.uk/translation-duch-ne-tajikistan-0.