Dr. Travis Zadeh

Biography

Travis Zadeh is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, where he is also the Chair of the Council for Middle East Studies. His teaching and research focus on the interconnected histories of science, magic, religion, law, literature, and philosophy. Zadeh's areas of interest encompass encyclopedism, cosmography, mythology, descriptive sacred geography, and the divine writing of scripture. He explores intellectual cultures in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu, alongside topics such as medicine and the body, occult sciences, and ethics. His work delves into theories of translation, secularism, and colonialism. Notably, Zadeh is the author of 'Mapping Frontiers of Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation and the Abbasid Empire' (2011) and 'Vernacular Quran: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis' (2012), as well as the award-winning 'Wonders and Rarities: A Marvelous Book Traveled the World and Mapped the Cosmos' (2023). Zadeh joined Yale in 2016 after a decade of teaching at Haverford College and earned his doctoral degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.

Research Interests