CSI Monday Majlis: Professor Samuel Hodgkin
The Blind Bard: The Afterlives of Rodaki Poetics
Register please on this link: https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/PqKX8HD6SaulZJfU76hsQQ
| An Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 9 March 2026 |
| Time | 17:00 to 18:30 |
| Place | Online Only |
| Organizer | IAIS |
Event details
Abstract
Samuel Hodgkin is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University, and the author of Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism (Cambridge, 2023), winner of the USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies. He is a co-organizer of the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, and his articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, PMLA, Iranian Studies, Philological Encounters, and Cahiers d’Asie centrale.
This talk considers the modern scholarly reception of Abū ‘Abdullah Ja‘far Rōdakī, the ninth-century poet and singer. It traces debates about the relationship between his biography and poetic corpus from medieval Persian poetic anthologies through their reception by European orientalists and then in national scholarship in Iran and Soviet Central Asia. At the heart of the chapter is Rōdakī’s supposed blindness, which enabled comparisons to Homer, but also raised concerns for post-Romantic critics that his poetry might imitate Arabic poetic conventions rather than registering observations of the real world.
