Shaahin Pishbin

College:

The Queen’s College

Current Projects:

A monograph on wonder, astonishment, and perplexity in early modern Persian literature in Iran and South Asia, examining their role in shaping ideas about love, language, and the environment.
A study on Safavid diaspora poets, occultists, and intellectuals in Persianate India, and their contributions to the formation of early modern Iranian identity and Persian philology.

Research Interests:

Persian literature; Persianate history and culture; comparative literature; Islamic mysticism; manuscript studies; diaspora studies; early modern studies.

Biography:

Dr. Shaahin Pishbin is the Laming Junior Research Fellow in Living Modern Languages at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, and a board member at the Centre for Manuscript and Text Cultures. He received his PhD from the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, and works at the intersection of Persian literature, Persianate studies, and Islamicate cultural and intellectual history. His current book project investigates the entangled concepts of wonder, astonishment, and perplexity in premodern Persian writing, tracing how these affective and cognitive states structured literary creativity, ideas about language, and ecological thought across Iran and South Asia. He is also researching early modern Safavid diaspora writers in India and their role in shaping Iranian identity, and the afterlives of Islamicate manuscripts in Bengal.

Dr. Pishbin has taught Persian language classes, as well as courses on Persian literature and Islamic thought and history. He was previously a Junior Fellow at the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. His peer-reviewed articles, translations, book reviews, and book chapters appear or are forthcoming in Journal of Persianate Studies, Middle Eastern Literatures, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, International Journal of Persian Literature, Iran Namag, and Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, as well as in edited volumes published by Cambridge University Press. He has lectured in English and Persian at the University of Toronto, Dhaka University, Ghent University, and the University of Chicago. His complete CV and list of publications are available upon request.

Recent publications:

“Lessons from the Age of ʿAjam: Teaching Persian with the Early Modern Archive”, in Persian Literature in Persian Language Pedagogy, ed. P. Shabani-Jadidi & A. Taleghani, Brill (forthcoming).
“Persianizing Bengal: Munīr Lāhorī (d.1644) and the Poetics of Natural Wonders in Manifestation of the Rose (Maẓhar-i gul)”, Delos: A Journal of Translation and World Literature, 41.1 (forthcoming).
“Fresh Lyric Pieties: Figuring the Prophet Muḥammad in the Safavid-Mughal Persian ghazal”, Middle Eastern Literatures (2025). https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2025.2568505
“Inimitable Complexity: Amir Khosrow and the Persian Poetics of Wonder”, Journal of Persianate Studies 18.1-2 (2025): 192-224. https://doi.org/10.1163/18747167-bja10062
Review of: Remapping Persian Poetry, 1700-1900, by Kevin Schwartz, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 53.3 (2021): 528-531. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743821000568
Review of: Naqd-i khayāl: barʹrasī-i dīdgāhʹhā-yi naqd-i adabī dar sabk-i hindī [Criticism of the Imaginary: A Study of Perspectives of Literary Criticism on the Indian Style], by Maḥmūd Futūḥī, International Journal of Persian Literature 5.1 (2020): 85-91. Link.