James White studied Persian, Russian and Arabic at Oxford, and completed his DPhil on the formation of bilingual literary cultures in Iran and Central Asia during the later Persian ‘Renaissance’ of the tenth and eleventh centuries. His principal interest is in examining the intellectual and political applications of multilingualism in the medieval and early modern Persianate world. This interest led to him writing his recent book on seventeenth-century literary communities around the western Indian Ocean, and it motivates his current project on the methods that medieval and early modern scholars in Iran used to compare Persian and Arabic texts. As most of his work relies on manuscripts, of which a significant corpus is held in the UK, he is also interested in bibliography, and in how scholars in early modern England conceptualised the multilingual character of coeval Persianate societies.
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“Adjacency and Interleaving: What Can Emic Methods of Comparative Literary Study from Medieval Iran Teach Scholars Today?”, al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā, 2026.
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“Collecting Arabic, Persian and Turkish Books at Queens’ College, Cambridge, ca. 1470-1900: An Institutional History of the Study of the Islamic World in England, from the Reformation to the Colonial Era”, in: The Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge, ed. Rodney M. Thomson, London: Lund Humphries, 2026.
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“Introduction: Collecting Islamic Manuscripts Under the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Life and Times of Thomas Thompson (d. 1666)”, in: Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Old Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge, London: Lund Humphries, 2026.
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“Catalogue of the Persian and Turkic Manuscripts”, in: Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Old Library of Queens’ College, Cambridge, London: Lund Humphries, 2026.
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“In Search of Intertexts: Imitation, Authorial Lineage and Networked Time in Early Modern Arabic Criticism”, in: Lives in Adab, eds. A. M. Key and L. Osti, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2026, pp. 221-237.
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“The Persian Poems”, in: Complete Poems of William Barnes. Volume III, ed. Emma Mason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
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“‘The Glory of the Artichoke’: The Gastronomic Lyrics of Busḥāq-i Aṭʿima (d. ca. 827/1423) Between Authorial Intention and Reader Response”, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 56:1 (2026), pp. 113-131.
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“Arabic-Persian Bilingualism and Persianate Identities in the Early Modern Western Indian Ocean: The Case of Mirza Muhammad Fayyaz”. In: Iran and Persianate Culture in the Indian Ocean World, ed. A.C.S. Peacock. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, pp. 259-274.
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“Textual Culture Between Iran and India: The Reproduction of Verse in Nasrabadi’s Biographical Anthology”, IRAN: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, 59/2 (2021), pp. 263-286.
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“On the Road: The Life and Verse of Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq, a Forgotten Eighteenth-Century Poet”, Iranian Studies 53/5-6 (2020), pp. 789-820.
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“Reading In, Looking Out: Hermeneutics by Implication in a Fifteenth-Century Anthology”, Iranian Studies 52/5-6 (2019), pp. 947-972.
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“Mamluk Poetry, Ottoman Readers, and an Enlightenment Collector: An Appendix to the Nuzha of Ibn Sūdūn”, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, 9/2-3 (2018), pp. 272-307.
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“Satire in the Paintings of Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam”, Iranian Studies Vol. 51/2 (2018), pp. 213-243.
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“A Sign of the End Time: ‘The Monastery’, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi H.2153 f.131b”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27/1 (2017), pp. 1-30.
