Alexandra Hoffmann
Research Area
About
About Alexandra: I am a scholar of Classical Persian Literature interested in gender & sexuality, embodiment, the history of emotions, and race/ethnicity in premodern Persianate literature and Perso-Islamicate culture. My current book project, Men in War, Men in Love: Masculinities in Premodern Persianate Poetry, 1000-1700 CE, examines the construction of masculinities in long narrative poems (masnavis). Among the poems I study are Ferdowsi’s famous Shāhnāmeh (1010 CE), as well as two epics in conversation with it – such as the Kushnāmeh (1118 CE), which features a monster as its main character, and the ʿAlināmeh (1089 CE), which replaces lineage with spiritual kinship. In my work, I also put forth a way of understanding the masculinities of lovers through the figure of Majnun in Neẓāmi’s Layli o Majnun (1188 CE), who constructs his masculinity with the vocabulary of fighting and enduring suffering. I also discuss same-sex eroticism in the Sufi romance Maḥmud o Ayāz (1614 CE).
Research
A main concern of my research is to engage with current scholarship in premodern Global Studies in order to incorporate Persianate Literature into Medievalist scholarship for a more diverse and less Eurocentric view of the Global Middle Ages. I have addressed these concerns in two publications on the Sendbādnāmeh, a twelfth century Persian collection of tales known in Medieval Europe as the Seven Sages (of Rome).
Current Areas of Concentration
Gender and Sexuality in premodern Persianate literature, especially masculinities, in epics and romances