New Face on South Asian Studies DR

Matthew Melvin-Koushki
2 minute read

We are very excited to welcome a new editor to “South Asia Studies Dissertation Reviews,” Susan Johnson-Roehr (University of Virginia). She joins the current editor, Rebecca Grapevine (University of Michigan). Our new duumvirate will continue to bring you friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this dynamic field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form. If you are interested in helping out in some other way, please contact info@dissertationreviews.org. Our South Asia Studies Editors can be reached at rebecca.grapevine@dissertationreviews.org and susan.johnsonroehr@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our Field Editors

Rebecca Grapevine is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “A Common Law Doctrine in a Post-Colonial World: Coverture in India, 1945-70,” examines the history of a patriarchal English legal doctrine in India after Independence. Her broader scholarly interests include Indian legal history, and its connections to American and English legal history, the history of 20th century India, and the history of religion in India. She is fluent in Hindi and has a reading knowledge of Urdu. From 2008 to 2010, she conducted archival research in New Delhi and Lucknow, India with the support of a Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship. She also spent two terms as a visiting student at the Delhi University Faculty of Law, where she studied Family Law and Constitutional Law. [Website here]

Susan Johnson-Roehr is an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia. She received her Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2011). Her dissertation, “The Spatialization of Knowledge and Power at the Astronomical Observatories of Sawai Jai Singh II, c. 1721-1743 CE,” analyzed the production and mobility of architectural and astronomical knowledge in northern India. She is currently working on a book manuscript that connects Indian scientific networks to the more expansive systems of material and intellectual exchange that characterized the “global” eighteenth century. Her broader academic interests include international heritage policy, architecture and urbanism, and the material history of the space sciences. [Website here]

Image: Vssun, Watchtower of Jaigarh Fort. Wikimedia Commons.

Post written by: Matthew Melvin-Koushki

Matthew Melvin-Koushki (Islamic Studies) recently completed a joint appointment as Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Faculty of Oriental Studies and Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and will be joining the Near Eastern Studies department at Princeton University as a Postdoctoral Research Associate before taking up a tenure-track position in history at the University of South Carolina. His dissertation, “The Quest for a Universal Science: The Occult Philosophy of Ṣā’in al-Dīn Turka Iṣfahānī (1369-1432) and Intellectual Millenarianism in Early Timurid Iran” (Yale 2012), won the Middle East Studies Association’s Malcolm H. Kerr award for best dissertation in the humanities. This study demonstrates the integrality of occult modes of knowledge to late medieval and early modern millenarian-universalist projects, whether in the Islamicate heartlands or Renaissance Europe. As a case in point, it focuses on the mainstreaming of lettrist or kabbalistic thought in intellectual circles in 15th-century Iran. Matthew’s current research expands on this theme to explore the theory and practice of the so-called ‘occult sciences’ in the context of both history of science and history of philosophy in the Islamicate world, and particularly their frequent interpenetration with ‘legitimate’ sciences such as astronomy or medicine through the early modern period. His most recent article, “Occultism and Universalism in Early Modern Islamicate Intellectual History,” is due to appear in al-‘Usur al-Wusta in April 2013.