About

Travis Zadeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. His academic role involves teaching and research within the field of Medieval Studies. Further details about his specific research focus, background, or key contributions are not provided on the page.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• History
• Epistemology
• Physics
• Art
• Philosophy
• Classics
• Art history

Selected publications

• Developments in Early Persian Exegesis

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-01-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The translation of the Qur’an, which should be viewed as part of a larger exegetical or interpretive enterprise, has a long history from its origins during the earliest phases of Iran’s Islamic history. In his survey of an array of relevant material from various genres on the basis of historical linguistics, numismatics, and codicological evidence from the pre-Mongol period, Zadeh explores the Persian vernacularization of the Qur’an and thus lays the basis for a better understanding of the emergence and full flowering of Persian Sufi literature.

  PublisherDOI

• 1 Developments in Early Persian Exegesis

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2025-02-06

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Wonders and Rarities

  2023 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Wonders and Rarities

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art history
  • History
  • Classics

  The astonishing biography of one of the world's most influential books.During the thirteenth century, the Persian naturalist and judge Zakariyyāʾ Qazwīnī authored what became one of the most influential works of natural history in the world: Wonders and Rarities. Exploring the dazzling movements of the stars above, the strange minutiae of the minerals beneath the earth, and everything in between, Qazwīnī offered a captivating account of the cosmos. With fine paintings and leading science, Wonders and Rarities inspired generations as it traveled through madrasas and courts, unveiling the magical powers of nature. Yet after circulating for centuries, first in Arabic and Persian, then in Turkish and Urdu, Qazwīnī's compendium eventually came to stand as a strange, if beautiful, emblem of medieval ignorance.Restoring Qazwīnī to his place as a herald of the rare and astonishing, Travis Zadeh dramatically revises the place of wonder in the history of Islamic philosophy, science, and literature. From the Mongol conquests to the rise of European imperialism and Islamic reform, Zadeh shows, wonder provided an enduring way to conceive of the world-at once constituting an affective reaction, an aesthetic stance, a performance of piety, and a cognitive state. Yet through the course of colonial modernity, Qazwīnī's universe of marvels helped advance the notion that Muslims lived in a timeless world of superstition and enchantment, unaware of the western hemisphere or the earth's rotation around the sun.Recovering Qazwīnī's ideas and his reception, Zadeh invites us into a forgotten world of thought, where wonder mastered the senses through the power of reason and the pleasure of contemplation

  PublisherDOI

• The Qur'an and Material Culture

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History

  One of the most detailed literary sources for the formative history of the Qur’an as a physical book is the Kitab al-masahif by the Baghdadi traditionist Ibn Abi Dawud al-Sijistani. The early prosopographical materials on the lives of prominent Qur’an reciters document a dual process of oral and textual transmission. Much of the material in Ibn Abi Dawud’s collection reflects the formation of a juridical discourse for treating the Qur’an as an object of veneration. A wide body of practices and beliefs emerged that promote the charismatic power of the physical Qur’an. The material sign of the Qur’an is shaped by a set of visual and ritual cues that are designed to affirm the sacred nature of the text as divine scripture. Embodied knowledge in the form of recitation and memorization also served as a means of widely disseminating the Qur’an.

  PublisherDOI

• Postscript: Cutting Ariadne’s Thread, or How to Think Otherwise in the Maze

  2020-11-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Modern scholarship has long been making magic as much as observing it, by carving out and labeling particular domains and activities as rational, authentic, and normative, while marginalizing others as primitive, folkloric, and deviant. Magic-talk is never impartial or disinterested. The categories we use to analyze Islamic history are predicated on a set of unstated values and assumptions that can often obscure our understanding of the past. The ability to name, codify, and classify is precisely what generates scholarly authority through specialized knowledge. Yet, categories and the meanings behind them are also in a constant state of flux. This holds true both for the conceptual frameworks that govern western scholarship, as well as for our objects of historical inquiry. Critique does not end by merely abandoning outdated terms and the ideas that animate them or by simply fashioning new ones. Rather, the task at hand demands recognizing that second-order forms of conceptualization invariably foreclose certain possibilities of thinking in other terms. The challenge posed by our taxonomies extends beyond a matter of accounting for the surplus and deficit inherent in all translation; we must also mind how knowledge is generated and how power is exercised. Attention to the conceptual frameworks we have inherited is powerful, as it offers possibilities for thinking otherwise. This chapter reflects on the range of material covered in the present volume, while further exploring the categories we deploy to understand Islamic history, with examples drawn from the circulation and transformation of various practices and beliefs over time and place.

  PublisherDOI

• Uncertainty and the Archive

  2016-03-19 · 6 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• On Reading the Library of Arabic Literature

  Journal of Arabic Literature · 2016-12-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Early Hajj: Seventh–Eighth Centuries CE

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-11-06 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Queen Zubayda (d. 216/831) and her husband (and first cousin), the famed Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (r. 170–193/786–809), are two of the most iconic figures associated with the early Meccan pilgrimage. Zubayda performed the Hajj on at least five occasions, and Hārūn nine times. They would travel to the Meccan sanctuary from the palatine city of Baghdad, which Zubayda's paternal grandfather, the caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 136–158/754–775), had founded. From the many public works that Zubayda sponsored along the route, the desert path from Iraq through the Arabian Peninsula came to bear her name, known popularly as the way or path (darb) of Zubayda. While the journey was no doubt arduous, the royal family was joined by a large entourage of high-ranking administrators, court companions, military officials, and servants.

  PublisherDOI

• The Art of Translation: An Early Persian Commentary of the Qurʾān

  Journal of Abbasid Studies · 2015-11-06 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  This article presents a description and analysis of a Persian translation and commentary of the Qurʾān, entitled Tafsīr-i munīr , by Abū Naṣr al-Ḥaddādī (d. after 400/1009), the earliest exegetical work in Persian whose author can be identified. A manuscript of this multivolume work housed in the Topkapı Palace Museum of Istanbul offers an important historical testament to the calligraphic development of Persian exegetical writing and the manners in which scholars and authorities sought creative ways to visually balance the sacred Arabic text of the Qurʾān with vernacular exegetic material. The manuscript also reveals a good deal about Qurʾānic book art, as well as the development of Persian commentaries and translations, thus offering further insight into the history of the Qurʾān across the frontiers of Central Asia and Khurasan.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric Tagliacozzo

  3 shared

• Alya Karame

  2 shared

• Benjamin Claude Brower

  1 shared

• Harry Munt

  1 shared

• Asma Sayeed

  1 shared

• Fareeha Khan

  Willamette University

  1 shared

• Gary R. Bunt

  1 shared

• Michael Wolfe

  Nvidia (United States)

  1 shared