Today’s Post is a Q&A with a new member of the EMSWG. Dr. Kaveh Yazdani is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History. 

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background (academic and otherwise)? Where are you from? Where else have you taught, researched, etc?

I was born in Tehran (Iran) and raised in Paris and Berlin. I studied history and philosophy at the Humboldt and Free Universities in Berlin, Germany. During my MA I got an Erasmus grant and went to Granada (Spain) as an exchange student for a year. I received my Master’s degree from Humboldt University in 2008 and a Ph.D degree from the University of Osnabrueck in 2014. For my dissertation, which focused on pre-colonial India, I conducted research in several Indian archives (i.e. in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai) for about six months between 2012 and 2013 and also spent several months doing research in Paris, London and Halle. In 2015, I obtained a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. In late 2015, I was granted a 2-year postdoctoral research fellowship at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2017, I was a Visiting Residential Fellow at the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study (UK). Between 2017 and 2020 I became a faculty member at the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and taught courses in economic and social history. In 2020, I was also Visiting Professor in Global Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna (Austria).

 

2. Can you tell us about your previous works/projects?

In both my Master’s and doctoral theses, I grappled with the “great divergence” debate. I tried to find out why the Industrial Revolution took off in England and not in India. To be more precise, I enquired into the question why two of the most dynamic regions of 17^th and 18^th century South Asia, i.e. Gujarat (in northwestern India) and Mysore (in southern India), did not industrialize first, how “modern” they were in comparison to advanced parts of Europe and I further examined the impact of early colonial rule in India. The monograph was published by Brill in 2017 and is titled India, Modernity and the Great Divergence. Mysore and Gujarat (17th to 19th C.). In 2020, my former supervisor in Johannesburg and now friend Prof. Dilip Menon and I published an edited volume titled Capitalisms: Towards a Global History with Oxford University Press.

  

3. What are your current projects?

I am currently working on a revised version of my first book that will be published with Primus Books in India. Unfortunately, the first edition of my book that was published by Brill costs $246 and is obviously inaccessible to most people. The new edition will hopefully allow a larger number of interested readers to purchase the book. Apart from that, I’m working on a monograph with my esteemed mentor Nasser Mohajer on the socio-economic relationships and connections between the Zoroastrians of Persia and Parsis of India between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries. I’m also working on a number of papers related to conceptual history, namely a Begriffsgeschichte/historical semantics of the terms capital, capitalist and capitalism as well as discourses on free and unfree labor between the 17^th and early 20^th centuries.

 

4. What sparked your interest in pursuing your current project?

The book project on the Zoroastrians emanated from my interest in the spectacular rise of the Parsi community in India as the subcontinent’s leading 19^th century capitalists and modernizers and a dearth of work on the socio-economic relationships between the Parsis and their coreligionists in Persia. My interest in capitalism goes back to when I still was a teenager and has a lot to do with my fascination with questions related to the multifaceted reasons behind inequality, asymmetrical global power relations and the underlying historical dimensions of the modern world. 

 

5. What are your other interests? (As a scholar or otherwise—everyday preoccupations, hobbies, grand ambitions, etc.?) Do these other interests inform your research in some way and, if so, how?

I’m very much interested in theories of modernity and the periodization of global history in a longue durée perspective. I’m also closely following publications in the fields of Indian Ocean studies, comparisons and entanglements between the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids as well as global labor history, especially works on labor relations that span from slavery to wage labor. Last but not least, I’m intrigued by works on the Persianate world spanning from East Africa to Northwestern China. I do have a number of diversions but, unfortunately, due to time constraints, I often only have enough time to follow the news and feuilleton, talk to my loved ones, watch movies or listen to music once in a while. Indeed, the sidelines I pursue help me to better understand the present continuities and ruptures of the historical processes that I study. But more importantly, along with the privilege of being able to visit new places in the course of doing research in archives or giving lectures and meeting new people, they give me strength, help me to get out of my bubble and connect to the world that I live in.

Today’s Post is a Q&A with a new member of the EMSWG. Dr. Santiago Muñoz-Arbeláez  is an Assistant Professor at the Department of History and the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Languages. 

1. Can you tell us a bit about your background (academic and otherwise)? Where are you from? Where else have you taught, researched, etc?

I was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. I went to college at Los Andes University in Bogotá, where I majored in history and minored in Geography and Anthropology. The department of History at Los Andes is a true gem. There I had the chance to learn from a diverse and innovative faculty in areas like environmental history, the history of science, and colonial and modern Latin America. I cultivated an interest in indigenous history and the early modern Spanish empire, which has continued to guide my work.

In 2011, I moved to New Haven, CT, to work on my Ph.D. in History, which I took from Yale University in 2018. I was strongly influenced by the faculty in the History Department in areas like Latin American, Atlantic, Native American, Borderlands, and Early Modern History, but also by the incredible Agrarian Studies program led by James C. Scott. In 2017, I began a position as Assistant Professor of History at Los Andes University, where I taught for three years before coming to UConn.

As a student of the Spanish empire in South America, my research has taken me to archives and research libraries in Spain, the United Kingdom, Colombia, and the United States.

2. Can you tell us about your previous works/projects?

My research to date has examined how the indigenous peoples of South America engaged in the creation and contestation of the Spanish empire in South America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My first book, published in Spanish under the title Costumbres en disputa: los Muiscas y el imperio español en Ubaque, siglo XVI, revisits the encomienda as a global, transcultural institution that took shape in the daily encounters between Indigenous peoples (in this case the Muisca  of the northern Andes) and the Spanish settlers in the 16th century.

I have also published widely on the history of Colombia’s map, from the earliest Indigenous and European depictions of the New World to the early 20th century.

3. What are your current projects?

I am currently at work converting my dissertation into a book. This project is a history of the making of a centralized polity, an entity of imperial governance termed the “New Kingdom of Granada”, amidst the diverse ethnic groups and landscapes of northern South America (present-day Colombia). At the time of the conquest, this area was composed of a patchwork of very different groups and landscapes with no cultural or political unity. In my research I ask how the Spanish imperial state sought to extend its rule upon the mountainous landscapes of the New Kingdom of Granada and convert the diverse Indian groups into catholic, tribute-paying vassals from the Spanish invasion in 1530s to 1650.

I also have several ongoing projects in public history and digital humanities. In 2015, I cofounded Neogranadina—a Colombian non-profit organization devoted to making digitization and digital tools available to local archives and community groups in Latin America. In 2021, I will launch Colonial Landscapes: Redrawing Andean Territories in the 17th Century—a digital history project that explores the transformation of indigenous homelands into colonial landscapes through the analysis of a 17th-century painting of the Bogota savannah.

I am looking forward to collaborating with students and faculty at UConn in areas like: Native American and Indigenous history; early modern history; the history of books, maps, and textual artifacts; agrarian and environmental history; and digital and public history.

4. What sparked your interest in pursuing your current project?

I believe that revisiting the history of early modern empires (and the modern world) from the point of view of Native American peoples is essential to our current world. And the new voices and stories that emerge must be narrated in formats that are available to different audiences. This conviction has motivated my current projects and those I envision for the future.

5. What are your other interests? (As a scholar or otherwise—everyday preoccupations, hobbies, grand ambitions, etc.?) Do these other interests inform your research in some way and, if so, how?

I am a very committed rock climber. Though right now my greatest ambition is to be able to actually arrive in Storrs, CT—a seemingly simple task that has proven unachievable in the pandemic world. (While I formally began my position as Assistant Professor of History and Spanish in January 2020, I am teaching virtually from Tenjo, a rural area in the outskirts of Bogotá.)

Réme Bohlin

01/28/2021

Last semester, in the fall of 2020, I had the opportunity to share an early draft of my dissertation chapter with the Works in Progress Writing Group. The chapter, “The Rhetoric of Ownership in Shakespeare Pedagogy,” is the second chapter in my dissertation which focuses on approaches to teaching Shakespeare. 

In “The Rhetoric of Ownership in Shakespeare Pedagogy,” I take as a point of departure Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi’s observation that “the rhetoric of ownership is ubiquitous in rationales for the teaching of Shakespeare.”¹ I analyze the frequent use of this rhetoric in Shakespeare pedagogy, and ultimately offer a critique. I argue that the rhetoric of ownership often stands as an ambiguous and rarely defined  learning objective. What does it mean to “own” Shakespeare? The rhetoric of ownership also, I argue, perpetuates problematic arguments about Shakespeare’s so-called universality.   

We had  productive discussion in the Works in Progress Writing Group. We talked about the ways that the rhetoric of ownership seems to cross political boundaries, with both liberal and conservative commentators asserting that students should “own” Shakespeare; we noted the unique use of the rhetoric of ownership with Shakespeare (are students asked to “own” Donne, or Milton, or Beaumont and Fletcher?); and finally we discussed other ways to rhetorically acknowledge or encourage student agency in the study of Shakespeare.

I am grateful to the Works in Progress Writing Group for hosting me, and to the faculty and graduate students who thoughtfully read and responded to my work.    

 

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1. Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016, 55.