Iran Colloquium: Piercing the Pearl: Neẓāmi’s Narratives and the Erotics of Speech

Austin O’Malley is the Roshan Institute Assistant Professor of Persian and Iranian Studies at the University of Arizona. A scholar of pre-modern Persian verse with interests in performance, rhetoric, and reception, his first book, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Persian Sufi Didacticism (Edinburgh UP, 2023), examines ʿAṭṭār’s mas̱navis to uncover an implicit poetics of didacticism embedded within Sufi homiletic verse. Austin has also published on the Abu Saʿid hagiographical tradition, the romance Khosrow-nāma, and the quatrains of Khayyām. He is currently at work on a second monograph on forged and spurious works from the Timurid period, in which he shows how literary misattribution—intentional or otherwise—functioned as a generative mode of imagining the literary past.