About

I am a teacher of history and global studies. My work focuses on representations and perceptions of East Asia in Islamicate culture. My current book project, The Hundred Kings of Samarqand: Silk Road Civic Lore and the Ottoman Book of China, will be the first monograph focused on the question of how East Asia was perceived and represented in Islamicate culture. Part 1 follows the evolution of representations of East Asia in the Islamic geographical imaginary, where China and, less often, Korea served as sites for imagining alternative political possibilities. A major focus of this section is the Epic of Kush (Kushnameh), one of several examples of utopian or messianic speculation about East Asia in medieval Islamic culture. Part 2 focuses on the Book of China (Khataynameh), a description of the Ming state and society written in Persian in 1516 for the Ottoman court, by ‘Ali Akbar Khatayi, a merchant from Central Asia who had visited China around 1506. Khatayi drew on civic lore about the Chinese state and Mongol political culture to advance a bold political vision for his Ottoman audience, in which the Ming state, then the most powerful empire on earth, was imagined as a constitutional regime with legal mechanisms for peacefully deposing emperors who violated the law or failed to perform their duties. This notion of China as a constitutional regime featured in later Ottoman debates about the sultans’ authority to contravene the Ottomans’ dynastic constitution. A core concept in this study is lore: the slow movement and accumulation of rumor and unverified information loaded with political judgment and emotion (Data’s evil twin, as it were)—the operation of memory over distance—that was the basis of non-expert knowledge of distant places. While historians’ relationship to lore is most often antagonistic, my work centers lore as a site of political agency where premodern travelers like Khatayi (typically of sub-elite status, travel being notoriously dangerous) leveraged the dependence of the ruling classes on them for information about distant places. The liminal status of distant places such as Korea and China—known to exist, but not familiar apart from certain facts about their material culture, wealth, and, in the Ming period, military power—that made them ideal sites for utopian speculation.