Visiting Scholar

Hadi Jorati’s area of specialization is the social and intellectual history of the Islamic Civilization, with particular attention to the textual nuances of the manuscript tradition, and philological intricacies of the three classical languages of the Islamic tradition. The focus of his work is the world of Medieval Islam with occasional forays into the Late Antique or Pre-modern period.

Broadly, his research is concerned with the interaction between scholar and society. Topics within this genre include education, institutions of learning, scholarly circles, scholarly correspondence, movement of scholars, and court patronage. Hadi Jorati’s PhD dissertation, “Science and Society in Medieval Islam: Nasir al-Din Tusi and the Politics of Patronage” (Yale, 2014) investigates a pertinent example of such interplay.

His other ongoing projects include, in social history of science: i) Revisiting Umar Khayyam's mathematical career, and ii) The Anwa' tradition as the Arabic science of the stars, and in Medieval Islamic history: i) Ilkhanid historiography in light of textual criticism, ii) The roots of Ilkhan-Mamluk military engagement during the Bahri period, and iii) the Persian secretarial families of greater Khurasan. His research interests include such divergent fields as Arabic and Persian Gnomologia, the Alexander legend in the East, the Persianate heritage of the Indian subcontinent, and Pre-and Early Ottoman Anatolia.