Biography

Pegah Shahbaz is a specialist of Persian classic literature of Iran, Central and South Asia. She is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy – the Asian Institute, an Associate Member of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur l’Inde, l’Asie du Sud et sa Diaspora (CERIAS) at The Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Section Editor of the Fables and Tales Chapter of Perso-Indica Project. She works on questions of narratology, translation and systems of knowledge transmission in the Persianate World, in particular the reception and domestication of Indian religious and cultural heritage in Persianate literary culture of Iran, Central and South Asia.

She was previously Visiting Associate Professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Japan (2020), Robert H. N. HO Family Foundation for Buddhist Studies Research Fellow at the American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS- 2019-2020), Visiting Scholar at Leiden University (2017) and McGill University (2017-2019), a Grant Researcher at the University of British Columbia (2018-2019) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sorbonne Nouvelle Université – Paris 3 (2014-18), where she worked on the “Perso-Indica” project. She completed her Ph.D. in Persianate Studies at the University of Strasbourg with a specialization in Persian prose narratives in India.

Pegah Shahbaz’s current research project is the study of the fourteenth century historiographies and hagiographies of the Buddha in the Persian language.

Latest Publications

“Women in The Realm of “True” Men: A Study of Gender in Persian Devotional Literature of South Asia” (2021), in Literature, Social Movements and Gender Isues in South Asia, FINDAS Centre for South Asian Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, forthcoming.

“Indo-Persian Narrative Literature: Cultural Translation and Rewriting of Indian Tales in Persianate South Asia” (2020), Asiatische Studien-Etudes Asiatiques, revue de la Société Suisse-Asie, Volume 74, Issue 2, pp. 387-412. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/asia-2020-0030.

“Čandāyan” (2020), Perso-Indica. An Analytical Survey of Persian Works on Indian Learned Traditions. F. Speziale – C. W. Ernst, eds., available at http://www.perso-indica.net/work/candayan.

“Persian Monshi Persian Jones: English Translations of Sa’di’s Golestan from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid Nineteenth Centuries” (2019), Iranian Studies Journal, Special Issue on Sa’di, 52:5-6, pp. 739-760, DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2019.1656056.

“Laughing at Adultery in Persian Literature and Culture” (2015), in: Studies in the Iranian World II. Medieval and Modern, Anna Krasnowolska – Renata Rusek-Kowalska, eds., Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, pp. 99-106.