Fellows 2025

Yassin Oulad Daoud is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. His dissertation will focus on master stone carvers (lapicide/tagliapietre) in the fifteenth-century Italian-speaking world, specifically on problems of design, contracting, labor, technique and skill, interculturality, and reception, in order to better understand their artform in its own terms but also their role in the evolution of Renaissance sculpture and architecture. His other research interests include early Renaissance understandings of and artistic engagements with attention, linear perspective and spatial issues in early modern European art and architecture, art historiography and theory, and collecting and composition. Yassin received his B.A. in History of Art and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

I am a scholar of the connected histories of early modern Persianate Asia with a focus on the circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between South and West Asia from the 17-19^th centuries. I have a particular interest in hermeneutical horizons and meaning worlds Indo-Persian literary culture and social history. My work is transregional, straddling Middle Eastern and South Asian studies. It is also interdisciplinary, drawing on sources and approaches of history, literature, and historical anthropology. I make use of the methodological and analytic tools of Intra-Asian, Indian Ocean, post/decolonial, and gender and sexuality studies.

My first book, Persianate Selves (2020) explores how early modern conceptions of place and origins provided expansive possibilities of Persian selfhood.

Under the broad working group heading of “Alternate Modes of Existence,” my newer work considers how precolonial forms of knowing and being can be used to reinvigorate imaginations and furnish new resources for addressing growing intertwined crises of capitalism and climate chaos. Inspired by decolonial thought, feminist historiography, and critical philology, I seek to engage with ideas and practices of Persianate adab (proper aesthetic and ethical form) as both historical subject and analytic method.

My current book project, Another Way of Being: Adab in the Persianate World outlines how a shared sense Persianate adab (as culture) was imagined and enacted in the transregional circulation of people, texts, practices, and ideas between Iran and Hindustan just before modern empires. I treat adab as embodied ethical forms (of social conduct, for instance) tied to aesthetic forms that lived beyond the written page or word, animating social meanings and practices, and providing a grammar of experience more broadly. Beyond circulation and the shape of the Persianate world, I focus on the ubiquitous politically and socially significant forms of companionship that structured both Persianate societies and the texts that remain of them. I argue that understanding the constitutive importance of these relationships allows us to read texts anew, envision historical political forms differently, and to see a homo amicus as the normative desiring subject of Persianate culture. I also think through how to understand religious, class, and gendered difference from this normative subject.

My work has been supported by grants from the ACLS/Mellon Foundation and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)/Mellon Foundation; as well as the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia.  I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and a senior faculty fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia.

Undergraduate courses regularly taught: Societies and Cultures Across the Indian Ocean (global core); Asian Humanities (global core); Contemporary Civilization (Core).

Graduate courses (all 4000-level) taught: Gender, Culture and Power in Early Modern India; Readings in Persian Texts; Transregional; and Significant Others.

In addition to research, writing, and teaching/mentoring, I have been on the executive board of the Society for the Study of Persianate Societies; Associate Editor for History for the Journal of Iranian Studies; an editorial board member of the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, and on the Executive Committee of the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

I completed my PhD at Harvard University, MA at NYU, and BA at Vassar College. I also previously taught in the History and Literature program at Harvard University.

Heidi began her PhD in the History department at Columbia in 2022, with a specialization in medieval social and religious history. Her research focuses on the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Venetian scuole, or lay devotional confraternities, and their links with ecclesiastical institutions. She is also interested in exploring the topics of class and hierarchy, how these were articulated along religious lines, and the ways in which the scuole both upheld and challenged prevailing notions of social and spiritual stratification. Her dissertation advisor is Neslihan Senocak.

Heidi graduated with a B.A. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 2020. Her senior honors thesis, “Prayer and Personal Identity: The Book of Hours and the Middle Class in Fifteenth-Century France,” received the Arthur Kouguell Memorial Prize for that year. She also completed an M.A. in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 2021.

I’m currently at work on two book projects. The first, Lovebirds: Avian Erotic Entanglements in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, is about how birds, rather than being mere “symbols” of love, performed actual work with respect to the erotic experience. In each chapter, I turn to a different confluence of birds and human subjects (confluences I propose to call “entanglements”) and to what those confluences enabled erotically. In an introduction, I trace the history of the association between birds and love back to classical antiquity but also forward, showing that it endures to this day in our contemporary erotic vocabulary and imaginary. In the rest of the book, I argue that human-avian entanglements made possible: a type of language that foregrounds the corporeal and sensorial over the semantic (chapter 1, “Pidgin Poetics”), erotic affects such as desire and pleasure (chapter 2, “The Wings of Desire”), the pivoting of love objects (chapter 3, “The Falcon as Fulcrum”), and memory of the love object (chapter 4, “Mnemonic Birds”). In a coda, I explore how metamorphosis into a bird seems to be a requisite condition for physical erotic contact, and especially for procreation, in much medieval literature.

My second book project concerns plant grafting and the way in which it became a way to think through different models of temporality and queer parturition.

I’m also the author of Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French (Cornell University Press, 2020), which documented for the first time the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French, and the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing song.

Beatrice joined the PhD program in the Fall of 2023, specializing in Renaissance and Baroque Architecture. Her primary research focuses on historical sources and fragments as fragile means of knowledge over the centuries. Additionally, her research interests include the intersections of national influences between Italy and France, the intellectual property of architects and the reuse of spolia materials during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Beatrice earned her Bachelor's (2020) and Master's (2022) degrees in Architecture from the University IUAV of Venice, both with distinction. Part of the research for her Master’s final thesis, titled “Bernin in Paris: An Unsolved Project Between the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace”, was conducted at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris-Belleville and received academic recognition from the University IUAV of Venice.