Description:

Abstract:
What does it mean to be both embodied and ensouled? In the Persianate world, questions about the compound nature of creaturely existence spurred inquiry across disciplines for centuries. How does the soul come to know itself? What does the body know? This talk reconstructs one style of approach to such questions by reading early modern Persian poetry in dialogue with contemporaneous prose works on medical science, revealing how in this period different disciplines—medicine, psychology, poetry—form a coordinated pursuit of knowledge that ranges across material and immaterial domains alike. 
 
Bio:
Jane Mikkelson is Assistant Professor of Humanities at Yale University. She specializes in the literary and intellectual cultures of South Asia and the Near East, working primarily with classical Persian, as well as Urdu and Arabic; newer projects include Russian and English as well. Her research focuses on forms of thought, methods of inquiry, and varieties of experience that are made possible by imaginative literature.