Junior Research Fellow in History

Meia Walravens

  • I am an historian of the late medieval and early modern Islamic world.
  • At Trinity College, I carry out research on elite community formation around authors of epistolary collections in the fifteenth-century Persianate world.
  • I am also preparing my first monograph in which I demonstrate the influence of transregional intellectual and family networks over the diplomatic relations of the Bahmani sultanate in Deccan India.

Profile

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, with a thesis entitled “Networked Diplomacy: Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Bahmani Sultanate and the Fifteenth-century Islamic 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 particularly interested in questions on the intersections of those fields, such as interactions between Persian and Arabic literary cultures; diplomatic relations across regions from Egypt and the Arabian peninsula, over Anatolia, Iran and Central Asia, to South Asia; and long-distance connections through personal networks.

Research

My research relates to Transregional History, Intellectual History, New Diplomatic History, and Indian Ocean Studies. In practice, I spend much time deciphering and reading Persian and Arabic manuscripts. The basis of my work often is a particular genre called inshāʾ, meaning “literary construction” and containing mostly – but not exclusively – epistolary writings. I believe this kind of source offers many possibilities to better understand the cultural integration (and political disintegration) of the fifteenth-century Islamic world from the perspective of a class of men that corresponded across dynasties and regions and was purposefully concerned with the unifying potential of language.

For example, for my doctoral thesis I studied letters which the Bahmani vizier Maḥmūd Gāwān (d. 1481) exchanged with prominent individuals in the Mamluk sultanate, the Ottoman state, the Timurid principalities, and the Turkmen confederations. My new project takes a more comparative and intertextual perspective to inshāʾ collections, and enquires into the existence and construction of “cosmopolitan” textual communities, as expressed in the writings of administrative elites.