About the Speaker:
Holly Shaffer is Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture at Brown University; she specializes in the 18th-19th century arts of South Asia and Britain. Her current book project reinterprets the eclectic arts produced in the western Indian city of Pune in the 18th century and their dissemination in print in the 19th century. Other projects include studies of ephemeral arts, such as light, cuisine, and architectural models in the northern Indian region of Awadh; and of European printed representations of India that went viral. She has published articles on these subjects in Journal 18, Third Text, Art India; and forthcoming in The Art Bulletin; and has curated exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art; the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution; and Dartmouth College.
Maeve Nolan is a second year PhD Art History and Archeology student at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently a visiting scholar with George Washington University’s Sigur Center whilst she conducts her research at the National Geographic Society. The title of her PhD is:
Dr. Janet Steele is an associate professor of journalism at the George Washington University and the director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication. She received her Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University and focus on how culture is communicated through the mass media.
Dr. Jonathan Stalling is Professor of English specializing in East-West Poetics at the University of Oklahoma, where he is a founding editor of Chinese Literature Today magazine and book series and the Curator of the Chinese Literature Translation Archive at the University of Oklahoma Library. He is also the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University and was the 2015 Poet in Residence at Beijing University. Dr. Stalling is the author of six books of literary scholarship, translation and poetry and his opera 吟歌 丽诗 was staged at Yunnan University in 2010.
Dr. Mikhail Pelevin is Professor of Iranian Philology at St. Petersburg State University (Russian Federation). His main area of research is the early modern Pashto literature conceptualized as the most distinct and expressive element of social culture and ethnic self-identification of Pashtuns in the transition period from the late Middle Ages to modern times. Among his publications in Russian are books Khushhal Khan Khatak (1613-1689): the Beginning of the Afghan National Poetry (2001), Afghan Poetry in the First Half and the Middle of the Seventeenth century (2005), Afghan Literature of the Late Middle Ages (2010); a new book The Khattaks’ Chronicle: the Corpus and Functions of the Text is coming soon. Few recent articles are available in English, e.g.: “The Beginnings of Pashto Narrative Prose” (2017), “Persian Letters of a Pashtun Tribal Ruler on Judicial Settlement of a Political Conflict”, 1724 (2017), Daily Arithmetic of Pashtun Tribal Rulers: Numbers in The Khataks’ Chronicle (2016), “Ethnic consciousness of Pashtun Tribal Rulers in Pre-modern Times” (2015). M. Pelevin teaches courses on Persian, Pashto, the history of Persian and Pashto literatures. His other academic interests include Iranian dialectology and Muslim law.
