James White

Biography

I am a historian of the late medieval and early modern Persianate world and its two main text cultures, Persian and Arabic. My main interest is in examining the intellectual and political commitments which led authors to write in one language, the other, or both, challenging the common but overly simplistic view that, east of Iraq, Arabic was reserved for text production on religious topics, while Persian became above all a language of poetry. This interest led to me writing my first book on seventeenth-century literary communities across the western Indian Ocean, and it motivates my current project on the methods that medieval and early modern scholars in Iran used to compare Arabic and Persian texts. As most of my work relies on Arabic and Persian manuscripts, of which a significant corpus is held in the UK, I am also interested in bibliography, and in how early modern British collectors and scholars 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.

Recent 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.

Recent articles:

“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. 259-273.

“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), 263-286.

“On the Road: The Life and Verse of Mir Zeyn al-Din ʿEshq, a Forgotten Eighteenth-Century Poet”, Iranian Studies 53/5-6 (2020), 789-820.

Research Interests
Iranian history; Persian literature; Arabic literature; manuscript studies; text editing