Biography
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.
Current projects:
A history of the emic practice of literary comparison in late medieval Iran.
An intellectual history of Islamic Studies in early modern Cambridge.
Publications:
Book:
- Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. Shortlisted for the BKFS Book Prize 2024.