|
Professor Ali M Ansari (Director)
Dr Tim Greenwood (Deputy Director)
Professor Robert Hoyland
Professor Nicholas Rengger
Dr Angus Stewart
Dr Dimitris Kastritsis
Dr Paul Luft (Library)
Committee Profiles:
Professor Ali Ansari Professor Ali Ansari is Professor of Iranian History. His books include, Iran, Islam and Democracy: the politics of managing change, Modern Iran, and Confronting Iran. His research interests are focused on the political development of modern Iran, as well as Iran’s relations with the West from the early modern period. He is currently working on a book about Iranian nationalism with a particular focus on competing ideologies and political myths. In this context he is particularly interested in the development of historical narratives and mythologies about Persia/Iran. His teaching reflect these interests, and he is involved in the provision of the core course for the Postgraduate Degree in Iranian Studies, as well as offering a dedicated module on Iran and the World from 1921. Prof. Ansari is also available to supervise students choosing the Directed Reading module as well as MLitt Dissertations. Students interested in pursuing doctoral research should, In the first instance submit a proposal and abbreviated reading list (no more than two pages) to Prof. Ansari on aa51@st-andrews.ac.uk
University Profile
Dr Paul Luft
Dr Paul Luft Born and educated in Germany, Dr Luft read Iranian History, Iranian Studies and Islamic Studies at Berlin and Göttingen Universities before undertaking a three year Visiting Fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford. He went on to teach Middle Eastern Studies and Persian History and Literature at Manchester University and also taught at the Oriental School, Durham University. Following his retirement in 1999 he became an Honorary Fellow of the IMEIS at Durham University where he founded the Centre for Iranian Studies with Ali Ansari.
He is a member of various academic societies in Europe, among them European Society for Iranian Studies, BRISMES and BIPS which has elected him as Honorary Vice-President in 2006. Since 1993 he has been a member of the editorial board of the journals of BRISMES, IRAN and several academic journals in Iran. His main academic interests are periods of transformation in 19th and 20th century history of Iran including the political and cultural changes from a tribalised to a court society in the first half of the 19th century and further administrative reorganisation of the state in Iran in the early period of Reza Shah. (1925 – 1941).
Nicholas Rengger is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at St Andrews, and currently editor of the Review of International Studies. His main research interests are in the philosophy of politics and international relations, intellectual history, the overlaps between theology, politics, philosophy and International relations and comparative political theory. He has published widely in all these areas. He has developing interests in Islamic and Iranian political thought and has edited or provided commentary on authors such as Al-Farabi, Avicenna and, in the contemporary period, Soroush.
University Profile
Dr Tim Greenwood Tim Greenwood is lecturer in Mediaeval History. His research is centred upon the political, social and cultural history of mediaeval Armenia (500-1100), including relations with, and the influence of, its Sassanian, Byzantine and Islamic neighbours. He has recently developed an interest in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Armenian manuscript production and illumination and has recently published a study on Hakob Jughayets'i, one of the foremost Armenian miniaturists and artists, who died in Isfahan in 1613.
University Profile
Dr Dimitris Kastritsis
Dr Dimitris Kastritsis Dr. Dimitris Kastritsis is Academic Fellow in Ottoman History. His book The Sons of Bayezid: The Ottoman Civil War of 1402-1413 and its Representation (Brill, 2007) studies the dynastic and civil struggles following Timur's defeat of the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara (1402). He has worked on medieval chronicles in Persian alongside those in Ottoman Turkish, itself a language modelled on Persian and impossible to understand without it. In general, he is interested in questions of imperial ideology and representation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Ottomans were facing rival empires such as the Safavids of Iran. The Ottoman-Safavid conflict had an internal dimension concerning the character of the Ottoman state, which by that time had become highly centralised along Persian and Islamic lines, whereas the Safavids had begun as an empire with a strong Turkic tribal base. Thus the study of Iranian civilisation is not limited to modern Iran, but concerns the larger Islamic world from the Balkans to South Asia, including the Ottoman Empire.
University Profile
Dr Angus Stewart Dr Stewart is a lecturer in Medieval History. His main research and teaching interests include the study of diplomatic, military and cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean world in the age of the Crusades (c. 1000-1350).
More specifically, topics he isinterested in include: the Fatimids, Seljuks, Ayyubids and, especially, Mamluks; the Mediaeval Armenian kingdom; the Mongols in the West; the Crusades, especially the later expeditions and planned expeditions to the Middle East; Crusading and Byzantium, and the Fourth Crusade; Capetian France.
University Profile
Professor Robert Hoyland Robert Hoyland is Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He writes on the cultural history of the Late Antique and Medieval Middle East in general, and has treated Iran in this period (ca 400-1200) in a number of different ways. In his first book, Seeing Islam as Others saw it (Princeton, 1997), he examined the Zoroastrian response to the Muslim conquest and occupation of Iran in the seventh and eight centuries, both in intellectual terms (how Zoroastrians made sense of the end of the Sasanian empire and the rise of a new religion, particularly in apocalyptic interpretations and theological debates) and practical terms (the socio-legal changes Zoroastrians made to cope with occupation and apostasy to Islam). His second book, Arabia and the Arabs (London, 2001), paid attention to the influence of Iran over the millennia on the Arabian Peninsula, particularly its eastern and southern flanks, which Iran exercised suzerainty over in the sixth century CE. Adin a more recent book, Medieval Islamic Swords and Swordmaking (Oxford, 2006), he shows the prominent role played by Iran in the formation and development of Islamic metalworking and especially the production of elite metal commodities. He has also taught courses on diverse aspects of the transition of Iran from the Sasanian to the Islamic period.
|
