Kevin van Bladel
I study the Classical Near East (described here and here) and my methods can be summarized as philology and history augmented by sociology and linguistics. My historical framework is the regions of Central Asia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria circa 200–1200, especially the Sasanian Persian Kingdom, the early Islamic empire, and its successor states up to the Seljuqs, although I do venture into the first millennium BCE.
My current research addresses linguistic history, which is the history of specific languages understood through the history of their speakers. The languages that have most of my attention are Arabic, Persian and other Iranic languages, Aramaic, and Greek. Linguistic history entails close attention to the intergenerational relationship of social change with language acquisition, language shift, and language change. Studying translations between languages frequently involves me in the history of ancient and medieval scholarship and religious traditions, which is another interest of mine.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. After receiving degrees at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (BA History, MA Classics), I took my MPhil and PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale. During my studies I spend three summers of intensive language study at the University of Chicago, one at Yarmouk University in Jordan, and one in San‘a, Yemen. In 2004 I was hired as Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California, where I was eventually promoted to tenured Associate Professor of Classics and Religion and where I co-founded and directed that university’s Middle East Studies Program (now Department). During that time, I also enjoyed stints as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. From 2013 to 2017 I was Associate Professor and department head of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University. I returned to Connecticut as a Professor of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations at Yale in 2017, where I still work today.
My most recent book is Ancient Persian: A Linguistic History (open access). It explains the evolution of the Persian language from Old Persian to Middle Persian in the Achaemenian period (sixth to fourth centuries BCE) as a function of demographic changes induced by empire; in this book I define and demonstrate linguistic history as a distinct field of investigation. Before that I published a short monograph on Written Middle Persian Literature under the Sasanids (open access), ultimately about the patterns of survival and loss of ancient texts and how these factors shape our thinking about the past. Earlier I wrote From Sasanian Mandaeans to Sabians of the Marshes (here), which sheds light on the early history of the Mandaean religion, its background in Sasanian Iraqi society and the adaptation of its practitioners to Muslim rule. My first book is The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science (here), investigating the Arabic reception and reinterpretation of Hermes Trismegistus, showing how the ancient Egyptian sage of legend came to be considered a prophet by medieval Muslims. I have published many articles on other topics; examples include Qur’anic cosmology (here), the history of the eighth-century Arabic translations of Sanskrit texts commissioned by Bactrian patrons (here, here), the last speakers of Elamite (here), Zoroastrian Middle Persian lore in Arabic reception (here, here), the development and misuse of modern concepts like “Islamic civilization” (open access) and “Semitic peoples” (open access), and language shift and conversion in the wake of the Islamic conquests (here). Some of my publications can be viewed on my yale.academia page.
About half of my teaching is in research languages. I have taught classical Arabic, Avestan, ancient Greek, Parthian, Early New Persian, Middle Persian, Old Persian, and Syriac, as well as Indo-European linguistics, although since I came to Yale my language teaching has been mostly in classical Arabic and ancient Persian. I convene a Syriac reading group, too. The other half of my teaching is varied: a triennial Sasanian Seminar; a seminar on the historical sociolinguistics of the ancient world, imparting the methods and models of linguistic history; a course on the history of Arabic from Proto-Semitic to modern dialects; a hands-on course in Yale’s large collection of Near Eastern manuscripts; a graduate course in which my students and I read the entire Qur’an in Arabic from cover to cover; readings in Arabic translations of ancient Greek texts together with their Greek antecedents; a lecture course on the empires of the ancient Near East from the end of the Assyrian Empire to the advent of the first Islamic empire, especially the Achaemenian and Sasanian empires; another lecture course on the history of the Near East from the advent of Islam to the Mongol empire (seventh to thirteenth centuries); and many other courses.
Students interested in graduate studies under my supervision in the area of the Classical Near East should seek preparation in classical Arabic above all but also in other classical Near Eastern languages. My advisees have combined Arabic studies with research in Middle Persian, Coptic, Syriac, Greek, and other languages, depending on their interests.
