"Restore Her Rights!" Sketches from Forgotten Persian Manuscripts | Arezou Azad
The Department of Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Chicago is honored to have Dr. Arezou Azad as the speaker in the Heshmat Moayyad Lecture Series for the Spring 2026 session. The lecture will be in person and on zoom on Wednesday, April 8 at 5:30 PM US Central Time in The Tea Room in the Social Science Research Building Room 201. Please use the following link to access the zoom: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/96374020687?pwd=7M9uPEsmcrMrmrq7fiYhpBhAsgX9Hr.1
Title: "Restore Her Rights!" Sketches from Forgotten Persian Manuscripts
Abstract: From a medieval woman farmer taking a stand, to a shopkeeper navigating the familiar challenges of work–life balance, to one of the earliest surviving Persian narrative poems on the biblical Joseph…
In this lecture, Arezou Azad shares unexpected insights that emerge from under-explored Persian sources, studied through the Invisible East programme in Oxford. Drawing on three medieval corpora of documents from Afghanistan, alongside the Bodleian Libraries’ Akhbār-i Barmakīyān produced in the Delhi Sultanate, she will bring to life a series of overlooked stories.
These materials not only illuminate everyday life in a formative period of the region’s history but also speak to enduring human experiences—from negotiating authority and identity to pursuing economic wellbeing. The paper also acknowledges the challenges that researchers face when working with displaced heritage and in areas of conflict.
By engaging with these manuscripts, the lecture invites us to rethink familiar narratives and to explore how new sources can connect past and present in meaningful ways.
Bio: Arezou Azad is a historian of the premodern Islamicate East (Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia), specialising in the period from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. She is Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Invisible East Programme Director at Oxford Lifelong Learning and holds the Chair of the Art and Heritage of Afghanistan at Inalco University in Paris. She has written multiple books, including Sacred Landscape of Medieval Afghanistan (Oxford, 2013), Fadāʾil-i Balkh or the Merits of Balkh: Annotated translation with commentary and introduction of the oldest surviving history of Balkh in Afghanistan (Edinburgh, 2020), The Warehouse of Bamiyan: Economic Life in Medieval Afghanistan (Edinburgh, 2025) and The Rise and Fall of the Barmakids: Stories from a Forgotten Persian Manuscript (Edinburgh, 2026).