Bijan Elahi, “Five Scenes from Icarus,” The Kenyon Review issue XLI (2019): 75-77.

This short essay considers rabbinic ideas of reproduction, likeness, and species variation in conversation with the work of Joann Sfar and Sunaura Taylor. Part of Ancient Jew Review’s Forum on Animals.

Este escrito trata sobre la vinculación entre la obra de Vere Gordon Childe y los planteos de la Arqueología Social Latinoamericana que tomó explícitamente al primero como referente y estímulo inicial de una arqueología marxista que ligara el pasado y el presente. Se revisan algunas continuidades, diferencias y convergencias entre este arque…[Read more]

The objects of science education are transformed, degraded and disappeared for many reasons, and sometimes take other things with them when they go. This close reading of an undergraduate physiology laboratory report demonstrates how the kymograph was never a stand-alone instrument, but intertwined with conceptual frameworks and technical skills,…[Read more]

Three Poems by Bijan Elahi in the 25th-anniversary edition of Two Lines:

“My Scent that Doesn’t Pass” [بوی من که نمیآید]
“Dupin Detects” [Dupin Detects]
“Song of the Moon Hanging over the Fields of Damascus”
[معلقه‌ی ماه روی دشت‌های دمشق ]

This chapter explores the legacy of the Iranian reformer and intellectual Abd al-Rahim Talibuf (1834-1911), as viewed from Daghestan, where he passed the last decades of his life. Talibuf’s eight books shaped the trajectory of subsequent Iranian intellectual history, and inspired the revolutionary constitutional movement. Talibuf’s example e…[Read more]

The early Church regarded dreams as potential messages from God, private revelations that appear as visions while the soul is undistracted by bodily sensations. Sleep, with its accompanying dreams, was also believed to be the temporary state of the disembodied soul as it awaits the resurrection of its body at the Last Judgment. Not only did…[Read more]

[Abstract. This paper begins by examining some of the claims of Dual-Process Theory (also known as Dual-System Theory), in particular its opposition of rapid, intuitive, automatic thought processes to those that are relatively slow, analytic, and consciously controlled. The former traits we share with our primate cousins and with other mammals,…[Read more]

Ernst Haeckel and Emil du Bois-Reymond were the most prominent champions of Darwin in Germany. This essay compares their contributions to popularizing the theory of evolution, drawing special attention to the neglected figure of du Bois-Reymond as a spokesman for a world devoid of natural purpose. It suggests that the historiography of the German…[Read more]

Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

This paper studies the interest of the early Mughals in the Shahnameh and survey the range of illustrated manuscripts of this text produced in North India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although there were several older copies of the Shahnameh in the imperial library, and the emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) is said to have enjoyed…[Read more]

In many US cities, especially those in the Rust Belt, the environmental goods and services (EGS) industry has played a significant role in restructuring local economies to promote new, flexible, and “creative” forms of service-based labour. And yet much of the environmental work conducted in these cities has been directed at an industrial pas…[Read more]

Should philosophy help address the problems of non-philosophers or should it be something isolated both from
other disciplines and from the lay public? This question became more than academic for philosophers working in
UK universities with the introduction of societal impact assessment in the national research evaluation exercise,
the REF.…[Read more]

Over the last 20 years the imbrication between capital and the university has grown much firmer. This
paper seeks to map one point at which this binding occurs: in critical theory. Recently scholars in strategic
management have turned to processual and relational ontologies in an attempt to reimagine the logics of
profit, value, and growth.…[Read more]

In this article, I will be focusing specifically on cryopreservation and two of the American biotechnomedical tenets introduced by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Gloria St. John in their technocratic model of medicine: the “body as machine” and “death as defeat.” These axioms are embraced by both the biotechnomedical establishment as well as the cryopre…[Read more]

While the trope of the Islamic pilgrimage (ḥajj) is well known, the impact of the imagery and concept of travel on poetic production from the Islamic world, particularly in Persian, has not merited the same scrutiny. This chapter introduces one of the most important and yet least-studied Persian travel narratives to an interdisciplinary r…[Read more]

This article examines how the Persian prison poem (habsiyāt) incorporated Islamic legal norms for governing non-Muslim peoples into its poetics. By tracing how Khāqāni of Shirvān (d. 1199) brought the aesthetics of incarceration to bear on Islamic legal regulations pertaining to non-Muslim communities (ahl al-zemma), I offer a new perspective on…[Read more]

Mīrzā Fatḥ ‘Alī Ākhūndzāda’s Letters from Prince Kamāl al-Dawla to the Prince Jalāl al-Dawla (1865) is often read as a Persian attempt to introduce European Enlightenment political thought to modern Iranian society. This essay frames Ākhūndzāda’s text within a broader intellectual tradition. I read Ākhūndzāda as a radical reformer whose inte…[Read more]

A study of the imagery of the monsoon season in the poetry of the classical poets Masud Sad Salman and Amir Khusrau.

A close reading of parts of Mohan Lal Kashmiri’s travel account in English to Central Asia and Iran as a Persianate text.