The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia

Important Notice:

The ongoing events in Iran in response to the tragic death of Mahsa Amini have had a deep impact on the SFU student population, particularly Iranian students, and on the Iranian diaspora, including the community here in the Lower Mainland. In recognition of the gravity of current events, the organizing committee of the Mirhady Lecture Series in Iranian Studies has decided to postpone the November 3rd event until the spring of 2023.

If you are a self-identified Iranian student at SFU and need support, SFU Health & Counselling is offering a weekly Iranian Student Support Group facilitated by registered clinical counsellors. The next support group is meeting on Monday, October 24. Details can be found at this link: https://www.sfu.ca/students/health/get-support/support-groups/groups/iranian-support.html

Additionally, if you know of or are contacted by any people who may be Scholars at Risk, they may be eligible for support through at https://www.sfu.ca/international/index/programs/scholars-at-risk.html or https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/.

The Simon Fraser University Department of History invites you to attend the 2022 Mirhady Endowed Lecture in Iranian Studies: The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia with guest lecturer Arash Khazeni of Pomona College.

This event will be offered in hybrid format. Guests who choose not to attend in-person will be able to watch the lecture live, and participate in the Q&A, via the Zoom platform. A link to the Zoom webinar will be distributed by email to all registered attendees with online admissions at 2PM on November 3rd. Only registered attendees with a valid email address will receive the Zoom webinar link.

IMPORTANT: Please choose between 'In-person Admission' and 'Online Admission' when registering for the event.

As Mughal sovereignty waned under British colonial rule, Indo-Persian travelers and intermediaries linked to the East India Company explored and surveyed the Burmese Empire, inscribing it as a forest landscape and Buddhist kingdom at the crossroads of South and Southeast Asia. Based on colonial Persian travel books and narratives in which Indo-Persian knowledge and perceptions of the wondrous edges of the Indian Ocean merged with Orientalist pursuits, Arash Khazeni will uncover the fading histories of inter-Asian crossings and exchanges at the ends of the Mughal world.

Speaker Bio

Arash Khazeni earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 2006 and joined Pomona College in 2010 following fellowships at the Huntington Library and UCLA. Trained as a historian of the Islamic Middle East, primarily Iran and Afghanistan, during the 16th through 19th centuries, Khazeni’s research veers to the margins and the places in between empires, world regions and nations. This emphasis on the margins and borderland spaces began in a Marxist vein, as a context for exploring the histories of societies “from below” in the path of E.P. Thompson, and a way of retracing the pasts of “people without history.” This method has also found kinship in aspects of the field of environmental history and become associated with certain forms of interconnected global history, in particular a wave of new studies of the Indo-Persian world and inter-Asian contacts and exchanges.

Khazeni's previous books include Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (University of Washington Press, 2010), Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (University of California Press, 2014), and The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020).

At Pomona College, Khazeni teaches courses on the Middle East, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean in the Department of History and serves as the coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies.