About

Alexander Jabbari is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. His academic expertise encompasses the 19th- and 20th-century Middle East and South Asia, with a particular focus on Persian literature, literary and intellectual history, philology, and the Persianate world. His work engages deeply with the literary traditions and intellectual currents that have shaped the Persianate cultural sphere, spanning a significant historical period that includes both the 19th and 20th centuries. As a faculty member, Jabbari contributes to the department's broad geographical and disciplinary range, which covers regions from Japan to Central Asia and fields from classical studies to contemporary media.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Political Science
• Art
• Psychology
• Law
• History
• Archaeology
• Ancient history
• Literature

Selected publications

• India in the Persian World of Letters: Ḳhān-i Ārzū among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists. Arthur Dudney (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2022). 336 pp. ISBN 9780192857415

  Iranian Studies · 2025-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• COSMOPOLITAN PHILOLOGY AND SACRED GRAMMAR

  History and Theory · 2025-09-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Persian developed a formal grammatical tradition comparatively late in its thousand‐year history as a lingua franca. This article takes up the emergence of Persian grammar within the larger trajectory of Persian philology. It explores questions about why and when such a tradition developed in Persian by closely analyzing the earliest formal grammar of Persian in the language: Minhaj al‐Talab (Program of Study; ca. 1660), which was written by a Hui Muslim scholar in eastern Qing China. This text is contrasted with a more mature later work of Persian philology from Mughal India: Musmir (Fruition; 1750s). Through comparative study of these texts and by drawing comparisons to Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and other languages, the article complicates characterizations of Persian and the Persianate as cosmopolitan and explores the complex relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular and between Persian and Islam. Persian has a sacred dimension for many Chinese Muslims, despite its primarily cosmopolitan function in Mughal India. This article concludes with a historical materialist analysis of the role of philology in general, arguing that the discipline is neither fundamentally reactionary nor colonial but rather a tool that can be used for multiple ends.

  PublisherDOI

• Persianate Dialectics

  Comparative Literature Studies · 2024-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT In this short reflection on the responses to The Making of Persianate Modernity, the author offers thoughts on the methodology of literary history, on the relationship between history and literature, and on the politics of historical research in general and Persianate studies in particular.

  PublisherDOI

• Origin Myths

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Origin Myths,” explores how literary historians narrated the origins of Persian and Urdu languages and literary traditions. I challenge the nationalist narratives around these traditions, of Iranian continuity and Indo-Muslim rupture, which remain dominant today. Tracing the reception of evolutionary theories and Orientalist philology in Iran and India, I analyze fundamental differences in nationalist thought in the two contexts. Iranians articulated a vision of linear language history, emphasizing continuity with pre-Islamic precursors to modern Persian which the addition of an Arabic element did not fundamentally change. On the other hand, Indian Muslims offered a contrary account of Urdu’s origins, emphasizing rupture with the pre-Islamic past and the constitutive role of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish in Urdu’s formation. Through a comparative reading of these "origin myths" I demonstrate how historically contingent the dominant narratives around Persian and Urdu were.

  PublisherDOI

• Erotics

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Erotics” engages questions of homoeroticism and bawdy poetry, two interconnected themes that appear throughout the Persianate literary heritage and the tazkirah tradition but pose problems for modern literary historiographers. While pre-nineteenth-century Persianate writing abounds in frank, unabashed depictions of homoerotic sexuality -- the dominant literary convention for depicting love -- modernizers of Persianate literature adopt a Victorian-influenced approach that emphasized bashful silence about sexuality, particularly homoeroticism. As Persian literary historians were faced with making sense of the ribald erotic poetry at the heart of the tradition they wrote about, homoerotic conventions coalesced as objects of scorn and relics of the premodern world against which modernizing historiographers positioned themselves

  PublisherDOI

• Print

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Print” analyzes the transition from manuscript to print culture and the formal conventions of modern Persianate writing. I trace the emergence and standardization of standard typography, orthography, and punctuation. Questioning the assumption that these aspects of print culture arose organically from the material conditions of modernization, I argue that they were fetishized as a kind of modernizing technology in and of themselves, and understood as productive of -- rather than products of -- modernization. In other words, Iranian and Indian literary scholars sought to modernize their prose by abandoning certain formal conventions of the Persianate manuscript tradition and adopting the conventions of European print: type rather than calligraphy, standardized spelling, and a new set of punctuation marks. The transition from manuscripts to a standardized print culture is typically presented as pragmatic, but it was shaped by various networks of affective attachments.

  PublisherDOI

• The Making of Persianate Modernity

  2023 · 22 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  From the ninth to the nineteenth centuries, Persian was the pre-eminent language of learning far beyond Iran, stretching from the Balkans to China. In this book, Alexander Jabbari explores what became of this vast Persian literary heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Iran and South Asia, as nationalism took hold and the Persianate world fractured into nation-states. He shows how Iranians and South Asians drew from their shared past to produce a 'Persianate modernity', and create a modern genre, literary history. Drawing from both Persian and Urdu sources, Jabbari reveals the important role that South Asian Muslims played in developing Iranian intellectual and literary trends. Highlighting cultural exchange in the region, and the agency of Asian modernizers, Jabbari charts a new way forward for area studies and opens exciting possibilities for thinking about language and literature.

  PublisherDOI

• The Late Persianate World: Transregional Connections and the Question of Language

  Philological Encounters · 2023

  • Linguistics
  • Psychology
  • Philosophy

  This special issue addresses questions of literary modernity in the Persianate world.The papers explore the near-simultaneous encroachment of modernity across varied territories and polities (among them South Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman lands) and examine the problematics that emerged as a consequence: language politics (classical, vernacular, demotic, national), national canonization, and the disavowal of Persianate genres and epistemes.Rather than indicating the end of the Persianate framework, however, these processes initiated a new stage of literary realignment, a period we identify as the "late Persianate," in which connections and exchange continued across borders in spite of shifting political and ideological attachments.This period of Persianate history has received less attention than the medieval and early modern eras, though recent scholarship has begun to take the

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Introduction to Mohammad-Taqi Bahār’s Sabkshenāsi: A Translation

  Journal of Persianate Studies · 2023-04-27 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Mohammad-Taqi Bahār’s 1942 textbook Sabkshenāsi (“Stylistics”) was a landmark text in modern Persian literary studies. It coined terms (like sabk-e Hendi or the “Indian style” of Persian poetry) and laid out a tripartite, geographical-temporal model for the history of Persian poetry which largely remain dominant today. Bahār’s articulation of a national canon of Iranian literature (comprising writings in various stages of the Persian language as well as Arabic) made Sabkshenāsi an important text not only for the nascent department of Persian literature at the University of Tehran for which it was written, but for twentieth-century Iranian nationalism in general. By combining traditional forms of knowledge with the methodologies pioneered by European Orientalists, it played an important role in modernizing Persian literary studies. The influential introduction to Sabkshenāsi is translated here into English in full for the first time, along with a preface explaining the work’s importance for Persian literary studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Histories

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  “Histories” shows how Persian literary histories emerged from modernizing historiographers’ engagement with the tazkirah, a premodern Persianate genre of literary anthology. The contradictions the tazkirahs posed served as an invitation to produce literary history, in opposition to what modernizers saw as deficiencies in the premodern tazkirah tradition. These contradictions and deficiencies included the fact that tazkirah writers did not see history as linear, progressive, and teleological, nor was historical accuracy necessarily a concern of theirs. This chapter examines how modernizing intellectuals changed conceptions of "history," turned premodern Persian literature into national heritage, and transformed premodern scholars into national heroes.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mehtap Özdemir

  University of Bologna

  2 shared

• Maryam Fatima

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  2 shared

• Tiffany Yun-Chu Tsai

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature; graduate emphasis in Feminist Studies

  University of California Irvine

  2017

• Master of Arts, Comparative Literature

  University of California Irvine

  2012

• Bachelor of Arts with Honors, Community Studies

  University of California Santa Cruz

  2008