Academic Bio
Shaahin is a PhD candidate working in the fields of Persian literature and Persianate cultural history. His research interests include the poetics of wonder and place as theorized and practiced by medieval and early modern Persian poets; networks of interaction between Persianate Iran and South Asia; pre-nationalist ideologies of language and belonging in the Islamicate world; Sufi ideas about speech, silence, and theophany; occult Persianisms; gender & canonization; paratextuality & paleography; forgotten literary experiments and oddities. He also enjoys translating Persian poetry into English and discussing the particular challenges and opportunities that it presents.
Shaahin completed his Masters in Oriental Studies at the University of Oxford, where he received a full scholarship from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. He has taught and worked as a teaching-assistant for a number of classes on Persian language & literature and Islamicate cultural history, and was a preceptor for undergraduate NELC majors at the University of Chicago. He was a junior fellow at the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, has run the Persian department’s Anjoman-e sokhan-e Fārsī (‘Persian Circle’), a weekly Persian-language lecture series, and has helped co-ordinate the Great Lakes Adiban Society for a number of years. His publications can be found here, and his CV and dissertation abstract are available upon request.