Meia Walravens

I’m a Junior Research Fellow in History at Trinity College. Before coming to Oxford, I completed a PhD in History at the University of Antwerp. My thesis, “Networked Diplomacy: Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Bahmani Sultanate and the Fifteenth-century Islamic World”, received an honorable mention in the 2023 BRAIS Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World.

My background is in language and area studies: I studied South Asian Area Studies at SOAS University of London (MA, 2015) and Arabic and Islamic Studies at KU Leuven (MA, 2014). I am interested in questions on the intersections of those fields, such as interactions between Persian and Arabic literary cultures, diplomatic relations across the late medieval Islamic and Indian Ocean worlds, and long-distance connections through personal networks.

My research relates to Transregional History, Intellectual History, New Diplomatic History, and Indian Ocean Studies. In general, I’m interested in how transregional contexts informed the composition of Persian and Arabic texts in the fourteenth to sixteenth century, especially in epistolography and historiography. I have published on Persian letter writing in the late Timurid context, and on Arabic diplomatic correspondence and history writing from South Asia. I further specialise in the history of the Bahmani sultanate. Topics of my previous and forthcoming work in that regard include: Bahmani diplomacy, the networks of the Bahmani vizier Mahmud Gawan, the Arabic writings of ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī, and Bahmani sultans’ discretionary power.

Walravens, Meia. ‘Review of: James White: Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century: Migrant Poets between Arabia, Iran and India (I.B. Tauris Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Persian Literature.) xvi, 255 pp. London: I.B. Tauris, 2023. £85. ISBN 978 0 755 64456 8.’ Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 87, no. 1 (2024), 212–213.

Walravens, Meia. ‘Puzzles and Patronage in the Persian Cosmopolis: Moʿin al-Din Esfezāri’s Acrostic Letter to Mahmud Gāvān.’ Journal of Persianate Studies 16, no.1 (2023), 42-66.

Walravens, Meia. ‘Maḥmūd Gāvān.’ In Oxford Bibliographies in Islamic Studies. Edited by Natana J. DeLong-Bas. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Walravens, Meia. ‘Review of: Emma J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), xix + 318 pp. ISBN 978-1-108-48193-9. Price: £75.00 (cloth).’ Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 28 (2020): 311–316.

Walravens, Meia. ‘Arabic as a Language of the South Asian Chancery: Bahmani Communications to the Mamluk Sultanate.’ Arabica 67, no. 4 (2020): 409–435.

Walravens, Meia. 'Multiple Audiences of a History from Sixteenth-Century Malabar: Zayn al-Dīn al-Maʿbarī’s Gift of the Strugglers for Jihad.' South Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2019): 226–236.