A CONFERENCE IN TRIBUTE TO ABBAS AMANAT
The Royal Domain: Empire in Qajar Iran and the Nineteenth-Century Persianate World celebrates the work of Abbas Amanat, who influenced generations of students over four decades of teaching in the Department of History at Yale, during which time he also established the Yale Council on Middle East Studies and the Program in Iranian Studies. Returning to the concept of sovereignty traced in Amanat’s Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896, this conference brings together his former students to present new research on the theme of empire in Qajar and Persianate history.
May 30-31, 2025
Henry R. Luce Hall, Room 203
34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06511
FRIDAY, 30 MAY
10:00 AM: WELCOME
Travis Zadeh, Yale University
Arash Khazeni, Pomona College
10:30 AM – 11:30 AM: PANEL 1: QAJAR IMPERIUM
Chair: Houchang Chehabi, Boston University
Assef Ashraf, University of Cambridge
“Finding Empire in Qajar Iran”
Farzin Vejdani, Toronto Metropolitan University
”Qajar Imperial Law: Deviance, Heresy, and Ritual Cursing”
1:00 PM – 2:30 PM: PANEL 2: CHRONCLES, BIOGRAPHIES, AND MEMOIRS
Chair: Farzin Vejdani, Toronto Metropolitan University
Tiraana Bains, Brown University
“The Remaking of the Persianate Chronicle in a New Age of Empire, circa 1750-1850”
Waleed Ziad, Georgetown University Qatar
“Female Spiritual and Temporal Authority in Durrani Afghanistan: The Bibis of Chamkani”
Nahid Siamdoust, University of Texas, Austin
“Gendered Leisure and Embodied Joy in the Royal Andarun”
3:00 PM – 4:30 PM: PANEL 3: SCIENCE OF EMPIRE
Chair: Travis Zadeh, Yale University
Matthew Melvin-Koushki, University of South Carolina
“The Tricksy Magic of Qajar Dominion: Memories of Timurid-Safavid Occult-Scientific Imperialism”
Arash Khazeni, Pomona College
“Zayn al-Abidin Shushtari’s Topaz and the End of Empire in the Deccan, circa 1799”
Hadi Jorati, University of Massachusetts Amherst
“Ali Quli Mirza Iʿtizad al-Saltana and the Maragha Observatory”
SATURDAY, 31 MAY
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM: PANEL 4: ENVIRONMENTS, ECOLOGIES, AND ECONOMIES
Chair: Magnus Bernhardsson, Williams College
Saghar Sadeghian, Willamette University
“Shemshad-e Khazari (Buxus hyrcana Pojark) in the Guarded Domains during the Nineteenth Century”
Ranin Kazemi, San Diego State University
“Persian Opium in the Global Market in the Qajar Period”
Amir Afkhami, George Washington University
“Pandemics and Political Resistance: Unraveling Sociopolitical Threads in Late Modern Iran”
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM: PANEL 5: QAJAR-OTTOMAN CONNECTIONS
Chair: Laura Robson, Yale University
Kayhan A. Nejad, University of Oklahoma
“Reinterpreting Elite Iranian-Ottoman Political Relations, 1876-1905”
Tanya Elal Lawrence, University of Sussex
“Neither Constitutional nor Revolutionary: The Constitutional Revolutions in Iran and the Ottoman Empire in Comparative Perspective”
2:30 PM – 3:30 PM: PANEL 6: GLOBAL AND LOCAL HISTORIES OF QAJAR IRAN
Chair: Latifeh Aavani, Yale University
Kevin Gledhill, Sacred Heart University
“A Qajar Prince in Russian Exile: Bahman Mirza as a Window into Russo-Iranian Connections”
Heidi Walcher, Ludwig Maximillian University Munich
“Power and Politics in Isfahan at the End of Qajar Rule, 1908-1921”
4:00 PM: CONCLUSIONS
Sponsored by the Yale Program in Iranian Studies, the MacMillan Center Kempf Memorial Fund, the Yale Department of History, and the Persian Heritage Foundation.