University of Toronto
Murat Umut Inan is a sessional lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on multilingual literary, cultural and intellectual production in the Ottoman world, with an emphasis on the flow and interaction of people, texts and ideas in a region extending from the Balkans through Anatolia into Iran and the Arab lands. He is completing a book on the reception of the Persian language and classics in the making of an imperial language, culture and scholarship in late medieval and early modern Ottoman lands, 1400–1600.
Research related to commentary
Murat Umut Inan works on Ottoman Turkish commentaries produced for the elucidation, translation and interpretation of Arabic and Persian philological, literary and religio-cultural texts that circulated across the empire. His work explores forms and contexts of textual production, circulation and consumption in the Ottoman commentarial tradition, 1400–1800. He is particularly interested in questions of authorship, textuality and readership as well as in forms of reading, glossing and interpretation.
Publications related to commentary
“Ottomans Reading Persian Classics: Readers and Reading in the Ottoman Empire, 1500–1700.” In The Edinburgh History of Reading: Early Readers, edited by Mary Hammond, 160–181. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2020.
“Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in Sixteenth-Century Istanbul: Ahmed Sudi on the Divan of Hafiz of Shiraz.” Philological Encounters vol. 3, no. 3 (2018): 275–309.
“Reintroducing Hafez to Readers in Rum: Sudi’s Introduction to His Commentary on Hafez’s Poetry Collection.” Journal of Turkish Studies vol. 35, no. 1 (2011): 11–34.
Other publications
“Imperial Ambitions, Mystical Aspirations: Persian Learning in the Ottoman World.” In The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, edited by Nile Green, 75–92. University of California Press: Oakland, 2019.
“Imperial Patronage of Literature in the Ottoman World, 1400–1600.” In The Empires of the Near East and India: Source Studies of the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Literate Communities, edited by Hani Khafipour, 493–504. Columbia University Press: New York, 2019.
“Rethinking the Ottoman Imitation of Persian Poetry.” Iranian Studies vol. 50, no. 5 (2017): 671–689.