Biography

Travis Zadeh is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University, with courtesy appointments in Medieval Studies, Modern Middle Eastern Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He is a scholar of Islamic intellectual and social history whose work draws on an archive of manuscripts, maps, cosmographies, natural histories, talismans, and illuminated books held in collections across Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his A.M. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and joined the Yale faculty in 2016 after nine years at Haverford College.

His three books together constitute a sustained research program in Islamic intellectual history, the philosophy of wonder and enchantment, and the material and social history of sacred texts. Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2011) examines how administrators, merchants, and scholars of the Abbasid era mapped the world through the frameworks of Quranic cosmography and sacred geography. The Vernacular Quran (Oxford University Press, 2012) recovers a largely forgotten archive of early Persian translations of and commentaries on the Quran and the theological controversies they generated. Wonders and Rarities (Harvard University Press, 2023) traces the global circulation of a landmark Arabic natural history across seven centuries and multiple continents, examining Islamic philosophies of wonder and the encyclopedic ambition to account for the fullness of the created world.

Zadeh has conducted archival research across Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. His research has been supported by numerous grants, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2024–25), a Mellon Sawyer Seminar for The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum (2019–21), an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship (2013–16), and a Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellowship (2013–14).