The study of the humanities is a truly global endeavour as cultures seek to make sense of the category of the human and its locations. What gives that inquiry colour, vibrancy, and dynamism, are the local and embedded expressions of the study of the human. Iran, both in premodern tradition and in the modern period, has been one of the leading Asian countries contributing to knowledge production and Muslim literatures and humanities. This volume, Humanities in Iran, offers a fresh voice about the structures, developments, receptions, and marginalization of the humanities (ʿUlūm-i Insānī) as a discipline in the Iranian academic context, particularly following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Humanities in Iran is a series of reflections upon the connection between the classic and modern subjects in the humanities in relation to Eurocentrism, processes of Islamisation, and beyond the classic insider-outsider approaches to the field.
Contributors
Hanif Amin-Beidokhti, Paul Ballanfat, Jacob Barrett, Zohreh Bayatrizi, Alessandro Cancian, José Cutillas Ferrer, Majid Daneshgar, Timothy Davis, Dhivana Anarchia Ria Lay (Arsya Lay), Abbas Farasoo, Mohsen Feyzbakhsh, Amir-Mohammad Gamini, Caitlyn Georgiou, Michael Haugh, Janka Yanzhen Chen, Reyhaneh Javadi, Mostafa Khalili, Erfan Khosravi, Trevor J. Linn, Sarah Landry (née Griswold), Russell T. McCutcheon, Omid Mehrgan, Azar Mirzaei, A.C.S. Peacock, Sajjad Rizvi, Ehsan Roohi, Rowena Abdul Razak, Ariane Sadjed, S. Fatemeh Sajjadi, Amir Sheikhan, Iván Szántó, Meysam Tavakoli Bina, Anastasiya Titarenko, Mostafa Yavari-Ayin, Ali Reza Yunespour, and Bahman Zakipour.
Majid Daneshgar is Associate Professor of Area Studies, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He was formerly Munby Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and also Marie Curie Fellow at Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), University of Freiburg, Germany. His recent publications are: Reconstructing Erpenius’ Library (Brill 2024) and Persianate Prose and the Making of Malay Muslim Literature (Gibb Memorial Trust and Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Mohsen Feyzbakhshcompleted his PhD in Philosophy of Religion at the University of Tehran. He is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation. He has published in several leading academic journals including the Zygon Journal of Religion and Science, and has edited a special issue on “Method and Theory in Qur’anic Studies: Islamic Scholarship and Muslim Universities” as part of the Brill’s Method and Theory in the Study of Religion (2021).
Azar Mirzaei completed her PhD in Linguistics at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She was also a guest PhD candidate at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Mirzaei is an Affiliated Researcher at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University , Japan. Her research expertise lies in linguistics, politeness and early modern Persianate literature.
Sajjad Rizvi is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History and Director of Global Area Studies at the University of Exeter. A specialist of Islamic intellectual traditions in the Safavid and Qajar periods and after, he is currently completing a monograph on Platonisms in Islam.
Contributors
Hanif Amin-Beidokhti, Paul Ballanfat, Jacob Barrett, Zohreh Bayatrizi, Alessandro Cancian, José Cutillas Ferrer, Majid Daneshgar, Timothy Davis, Dhivana Anarchia Ria Lay (Arsya Lay), Abbas Farasoo, Mohsen Feyzbakhsh, Amir-Mohammad Gamini, Caitlyn Georgiou, Michael Haugh, Janka Yanzhen Chen, Reyhaneh Javadi, Mostafa Khalili, Erfan Khosravi, Trevor J. Linn, Sarah Landry (née Griswold), Russell T. McCutcheon, Omid Mehrgan, Azar Mirzaei, A.C.S. Peacock, Sajjad Rizvi, Ehsan Roohi, Rowena Abdul Razak, Ariane Sadjed, S. Fatemeh Sajjadi, Amir Sheikhan, Iván Szántó, Meysam Tavakoli Bina, Anastasiya Titarenko, Mostafa Yavari-Ayin, Ali Reza Yunespour, and Bahman Zakipour.
This volume would be a proper source for the people (academic, specialists, researchers, practitioners) interested in the history of Iran, history of education in Iran, Asian studies, Middle Eastern studies, Muslim Intellectual thoughts, and critical thinking.