Riaz Howey

A scholar of premodern agricultural knowledge, Riaz Howey is currently a project coordinator supporting the editing of a collected volume featuring translations of Arabic and Chinese agricultural knowledge and contextual essays.

Riaz Howey recently submitted a doctoral dissertation in the History and Culture of the Islamic World to the University of Bonn. During his doctoral studies, he was based in Berlin at the MPIWG as a predoctoral fellow and before that did his MA in Global History at the Freie Universität Berlin and BA in History and Economics at New York University Abu Dhabi.  His doctoral research focused on agricultural knowledge in the Persian-language texts of the Islamic agricultural corpus, resulting in a new overview of the sub-corpus, with much of the thesis dedicated to a detailed study of a significant yet understudied text from the Ilkhanid Period, the Ās̱ār va Aḥyāʾ of Fażlullāh Rashīd al-Dīn Hamadānī. His research has focused on themes such as materials, labor rhythms, environmental history and non-elite knowledge and how these all tie in with power and epistemological norms.