Derek Mancini-lander

Biography

  Dr. Mancini-Lander received his Ph.D. in the history of the Islamicate world from the Department Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in August 2012, His doctoral dissertation, “Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd” was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Prize in the Humanities by the Middle East Studies Association in 2013. Dr. Mancini-Lander also holds an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the University of Toronto (1997) and a B.A. in English from Kenyon College, in Ohio (1994). Before joining the faculty at SOAS, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East History at Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a highly selective American liberal arts college. Dr. Mancini-Lander’s research and teaching revolve around the cultural history of the late medieval and early modern Persianate world. He is especially interested in urban and local history, and in particular the intersection between space, memory, and narrative in Persian historiography.  His work focuses on shrine-centered religiosity and its place in imperial programs of sacred kingship.  The bulk of his work centers especially on the history of the Safavid Empire  

Research Interest

Mancini-Lander’s research concerns the cultural history of the late medieval and early modern Persianate world.  He has a particular interest in shrine-centered religiosity and its connection to the propagation of millenarian ideology, especially in the imperial courts of the Islamic East after the Mongol dispensation. In this regard, his work studies the dynamic between saintly sites and imperial policy by focusing on literary forms of commemoration, such as hagiography, shrine guides, and local histories on the one hand, and dynastic histories on the other hand. Taken together, these types of literature demonstrate a constant competition for religious and political authority between sovereigns at court and local elites of other key centers of the realm. These were competitions that also played out in monumental architectural programs and urban planning, and consequently, in patterns of patronage as well. As such, his work highlights the ways in which the very meaning and locus of authority was often in flux as agents at court and in the periphery regularly strove to negotiate their status and power in both historical writing and in building projects.