Arash Khazeni

Professor of History; Chair of History; Coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies
Office:
124

United States

United States

With Pomona Since: 2010

Office Hours

Tuesday
12:30 pm-2:30 pm
  • Expertise

    Expertise

    Arash Khazeni completed a Ph.D. in history at Yale University in 2006 and joined Pomona College in 2010 after fellowships at the Huntington Library and UCLA. His research is focused on the Persianate cultures of Iran, India and the Indian Ocean during the 18th and 19th centuries and has been concerned with themes of imperial history, environmental history and the history of science. He is the author of Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (University of Washington Press, 2010), Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (University of California Press, 2014) and The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2020). Currently, he is working on two projects. The first is centered on an anonymous illustrated early 19th-century chronicle on the Afghan Durrani Empire and the built environment of its fortress cities. The second project is on the history of the astral sciences in the late 18th-century Deccan.

    At Pomona College, Khazeni teaches courses on the Middle East, South Asia and the Indian Ocean in the Department of History and serves as the coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies.

    Research Interests

    • Middle Eastern, Indo-Persian, Indian Ocean history
    • Persian Travel Writing
    • Empires and Environments
    • History of Science

    Areas of Expertise

    • Middle Eastern, Indo-Persian, Indian Ocean history
    • World History
    • Empires
    • Environmental History
  • Work

    Work

    The City and the Wilderness: Indo-Persian Encounters in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020)

    Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)

    Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010) Winner of the Middle East Studies Association Houshang Pourshariati Book Award, 2010

    “Fortressed City: Kabul and the Face of the Durrani Empire of Afghanistan, circa 1817,” Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Cultures of the Islamic World, 42 (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming, 2027)

    “‘On the Wonders of Islands and the Strangeness of Seas’: The Indian Ocean in the Shegarfnama-ye Velayat,” Book of Wonders: A Travel Narrative from India to England, ed. Abbas Amanat (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

    “Indo-Persian Travel Writing and the Ends of the Mughal World,” Past and Present 243, 1, 2019 (Oxford University Press)

    “Merchants to the Golden City: The Persian Letter of King Chandrawizaya Raja and the Elephant and Ivory Trade in the Early Modern Indian Ocean, a View from 1728,” Iranian Studies 51, 6 (2018), 933-945.

    “Through an Ocean of Sand: Pastoralism and the Equestrian Culture of the Eurasian Steppe,” Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Alan Mikhail (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)

    “Across the Black Sands and the Red: Travel Writing, Nature, and the Reclamation of the Eurasian Steppe, circa 1850,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, 4, 2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

    “The River's Edge: The Steppes of the Oxus and the Boundaries of the Near East and Central Asia, c. 1500-1800,” Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Abbas Amanat, Michael Bonine, and Michael Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)

    Co-edited with Pardis Mahdavi, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East: Trade and Traffic in the Persianate World 30, 3, 2010 (Durham: Duke University Press)

  • Education

    Education

    Ph.D.
    Yale University

    Master of Arts
    Yale University

    Bachelor of Arts
    University of Wisconsin, Madison

    Recent Courses Taught

    • Empire and Colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa
    • Environmental Histories
    • Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals
    • Indian Ocean World
    • Iran and the World
    • Mughal India
    • The Middle East and North Africa Since 1500
    • Worlds of Islam
  • Awards & Honors

    Awards & Honors

    Balzan Keddie Fellowship, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles, 2010

    The Huntington Library, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Short Term Research Fellowship, 2009-2010