A third Research Fellow has been appointed to the Silk Roads Programme at King’s, the College’s ambitious initiative for the study of the history and culture of the countries, societies, and cultures from the Western borders of China to the Mediterranean Sea. Reza Huseini will be joining the two inaugural Research Fellows, Edward Zychowicz-Coghill and Katie Campbell, in October this year.
Reza’s historical research focuses on the late antique to early modern history of Iran, Central Asia, and India. He completed degrees in History at Jawaharlal Nehru University (India) and Leiden University (the Netherlands), where he researched the historical and cultural interconnectivity between these regions. Reza’s doctoral dissertation - researched at Leiden University - investigated the diverse and dynamic processes of the early Muslim conquests of Bactria in the seventh and eighth centuries. To do so, he worked with a vast range of documentary and literary sources together with other sources of material culture to analyse the processes of the conquests and naturalisation of the early Muslim rule in eastern Iranian regions.
For the Silk Roads Programme at King’s, Reza will focus on three moments of the Turco-Mongol world-conquest: the Ilkhanids, the Timurids, and the early Mughals. By a close reading of a family of Persian texts produced under these three dynasties, he will attempt to explain how these conquering dynasties searched for a new ‘Imperial Ideology’ that is universal enough to encompass a wide variety of ethnic, social, cultural, and religious groups.
