Jane Mikkelson

Jane Mikkelson joins the FAS as Assistant Professor of Humanities. She specializes in the literary and intellectual cultures of South Asia and the Near East, working primarily with classical Persian, as well as Urdu and Arabic; newer projects include Russian and English as well. Her research focuses on forms of thought, methods of inquiry, and varieties of experience that are made possible by imaginative literature. Recent publications discuss planetary poetics; the Arabic concept of taste (dhawq) and seventeenth-century English thought; a geopolitical turn in literary criticism; and the ambient availability of Avicenna’s philosophy for Persian poets. Her current book project investigates how poetry shaped new kinds of inquiry across disciplines in the early modern Persianate world. Other ongoing projects, both individual and co-authored, aim to bridge the studies of South Asian, Near Eastern, and European cultures through comparison and collaboration. Mikkelson earned a joint PhD in South Asian and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago in 2019, supported by a Neubauer Family Presidential Fellowship and an Elder Olson Fellowship for the study of poetry and poetics.