Jane Mikkelson

Jane Mikkelson joins Yale as Lecturer and Associate Research Scholar in Comparative Literature and in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. As a scholar of comparative literature, her research and teaching focus on premodern literary cultures of South Asia and the Near East, with a particular interest in theories of literature, philosophy and literature, translation studies, and entangled early modernities. Recent publications discuss representations of fugitive experience in early modern Persian poetry; the Arabic concept of taste (dhawq) and seventeenth-century English thought; a geopolitical turn in Persian literary criticism; canonicity and innovation in Safavid and Mughal literary traditions; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for Persian poets. Her first book project, Your Broken Colors: A Theory of Poetry and Fugitive Experience, examines how poets writing in Persian (many of whom also wrote in Arabic and Urdu) developed creative new forms of interdisciplinarity that redefined the content, aims, and methods of philosophical and scientific inquiry in early modernity. 

Mikkelson received a joint PhD in South Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2019. Before coming to Yale, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia (College Fellows). Her ongoing research projects, both individual and collaborative, bridge the studies of early modern South Asian, Near Eastern, and European literary and intellectual cultures.