Jean Arzoumanov. Source: Andreea Dican, 2025.
As a historian of early modern and modern Persianate intellectual history in South Asia, Jean Arzoumanov studies the textual encounters between Islamicate and Indic cultures. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Between 2023-2025, Jean was Rocher Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.
His current monograph project focuses on the involvement of non-Muslim literati in Persian literary production, with particular attention to the emergence of Hindu devotional literature in Persian. In parallel, he is completing for Primus Books a partial translation of the Tašrīḥ
al-aqvām, a Persian ethnographic compendium composed in 1825 in North India. He has also published several papers on the representation and translation of the Jain tradition in Persian.
Jean is associated with the research group "Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia" (ASTRA), where his research focuses on the adaptation and translation of Indic astral sciences into Persian in early modern North India.
Projects
SITARA – Sanskrit and Islamicate Traditions of Astrology in Reciprocal Adaptation