crPrashant Keshavmurthy Photo

Faculty

Keshavmurthy, Prashant

McGill University, Institute of Islamic Studies

Location

Montreal, Quebec

Phone Number

(514) 398-4400 ext. 09655

Email Address
Website

I am Associate Professor of Persian-Iranian Studies and have worked in the Institute of Islamic Studies since 2009. I teach across all periods of Persian literature. My first book, Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark (Routledge, 2016), is a study of poetics and politics in the work of the poet ‘Abd al-Qādir Bidel (d.1720) and his circle. My second book, co-translated with Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi, is Sohrab Sepehri, The Eight Books: A Complete English Translation (Brill, 2022). My most recent publication is “Two Interpretive Postures and Two Kinds of Friendship in Mughal Commentaries on Sa‘dī’s Gulistān” in PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Volume 137, Issue 2, March 2022. I am also writing a monograph on craving and craft in Nizāmī of Ganja’s famous quintet of poems.

I offer graduate seminars on Pre-Modern Persian Literary Criticism, Autobiography in the Islamic World,Inshā: Persian Epistolography, and on Amir Khusrow. I also teach undergraduate courses on Persian literature in English translation and on the literatures (especially Persian and Urdu) and histories of Islam in South Asia.