This page contains details of the doctoral research students currently working within the Faculty of Oriental Studies. The list below gives their name, the topic of their research, and, where available, a brief abstract, organised by sub-faculty.

Near and Middle East     South and Inner Asia     East Asia

Near and Middle East

Kelly Al-Dakkak - Religious Dialogue, Pluralism, and Historical Interpretation: The Works of Mohamed Talbi

In her doctoral dissertation, Kelly Al-Dakkak analyses and critiques the methodology and conclusions of Tunisian public intellectual Mohamed Talbi.  The work introduces Talbi’s ‘vectoral reading of the Qur’an,’ wherein Talbi seeks to interpret the text according to asbāb al-nuzūl in order to locate the intentions (maqāṣid) of the Lawgiver.  As Talbi’s ultimate aim throughout his writing is the distillation of a set of core, universal ethics from the Qur’an, Kelly proceeds to analyse a number of case examples, wherein Talbi applies his methodology to questions of governance, personal status, and interfaith dialogue.

This research represents the first comprehensive English-language work on Mohamed Talbi and will serve to enhance the body of literature on North African and Islamic thought.  While Kelly presents evidence of a number of internal inconsistencies and a problematic approach to citation in Talbi’s work, she also explores in brief the work of a new generation of scholars who are taking up his methodology and working to resolve gaps and shortcomings therein. Neither strictly a modernist nor an Islamist, a wider understanding of this influential and controversial intellectual will allow for a clearer image of the subtle and unclassifiable nature of Islamic thought within the last two decades.

Zahir Bhalloo - Litigant Strategies in Waqf Disputes from Qajar Iran, 1820-1925

Compared to a long standing tradition of scholarship that has used Ottoman sharīʿa court records (sijillāt) to study the practice of Islamic law, there have been few studies of practice based on sharīʿa court records from pre-modern Iran. My doctoral thesis is an attempt at filling this gap. I use surviving sharīʿa court records (asnād-i sharʿī) from disputes over waqf property to study the practice Islamic law in Qajar Iran. I have chosen waqf because it is one of the few areas of Islamic law in Iran where surviving sharīʿa court records are numerous enough to allow us to reconstruct in some detail practice in a local setting. I intend to examine in particular: litigant strategies in cases where the control of waqf lands was disputed; the flexibility of the application of waqf law in response to the actual conditions of the cases and the impact the contested nature of religious authority in the Qajar period had on the resolution of the waqf disputes. Insights gained from my research will be a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Qajar legal system and the historical praxis of Islamic law in Iran.

Dörthe Engelcke - Why do Arab authoritarian states reform family law or why do they not? Policy-making in authoritarian states

An analysis of policy making in authoritarian Arab states is proposed, taking family law reform as a case study. The study aims to explain why some authoritarian states reform family law while others do not – i.e. why similar cases vary on their outcome: their engagement in family law reform. By first applying a method of similarity, the reform process of family law in Algeria in 2005 will be compared to the one in Morocco in 2004 and the one in Syria in 2003. Following that analysis, Jordan will function as an outlier case and a method of difference will be applied to compare the three former cases to the situation in Jordan where calls for reform of the Personal Status Code have not been translated into legislation in 2003. By applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field, the field of reform will be conceptualized and the following hypotheses will be tested: Family law reform is a policy concession to modify the relation between the state and certain groups within society in case these groups are seen as adequate partners to replace other traditional allies. Furthermore, it functions as a tool of foreign policy.

Emilie Francois - The Movement for Unicity and Reform: A social movement approach

Haraka at-Tawhid wa al Islah, the Movement for Unicity and Reform is one of the largest islamic social movements in Morocco today. It is the movement which launched the Party of Justice and Development (PJD), the largest Islamic political opposition movement in the parliament and has associations working in all fields of society, from education, to prozelitism, to trade unions and women’s rights. A social movement theory approach will seek to outline the movement’s history, organisation and ideological outlook and situate them within historical developments, including broader movements, nationally and internationally. A detailed analysis of the movement will aim to contribute to the literature on Islamic social movements more broadly, notably their roots, aims and objectives, and evolution.

Gareth Hughes - The Syriac verse-homilies of Narsai of Nisibis on the Palm Festival and Holy Week

Narsai of Nisibis was born sometime near the end of of the fourth century AD or the beginning of the fifth in what is today the Duhok Governorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, then part of the frontier region of Sasanian Persia. He was educated at the famous School of the Persians in Edessa, in Byzantine territory, rising to become its last master before its closure by order of Zeno in 489. Back in Sasanian territory, he founded the School of Nisibis, which became the foremost educational centre of the Sasanian church. Narsai lived into old age, dying around 502.

Narsai is alleged to have written more than 300 mēmrē(ܡܐܡܪ̈ܐ) — verse homilies or poetic sermons. However, only around 80 are extant. Many of these appear to have been written to complement the lectionary and the church year.

The group for the Palm Festival and Holy Week number perhaps as many as ten mēmrē. Most are unedited, and one — 32 ‘The Canaanite Woman’ — has not be published.

Hilary Kalmbach - From Turban to Tarboosh? Dar al-‘Ulum and Social Change in Early Twentieth Century Egypt

This dissertation uses the early twentieth-century Dar al-‘Ulum teacher training college and its graduates as a prism through which to view dynamics of social, educational and religious change in Egypt between 1900 and 1940.  Dar al-‘Ulum was founded under Egyptian ruler Khedive Ismail in 1872 and merged with Cairo University in 1946.  It bridged and merged two parallel educational tracks, taking would-be shaykhs from top religious institutes and granting them a certificate from the newly-established government school system.  This not only significantly enhanced their job opportunities and (eventually) gave them access to the ‘modern’ title ‘effendi’, but also enabled graduates to claim expertise in both religious and ‘modern’ subjects.

Seeing Dar al-‘Ulum as a hybridized institution is the key to understanding the ability of many of its graduates to straddle or cross the social boundaries drawn in the early twentieth century between ‘shaykh’ and ‘efendi’, or ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’.  This training not only qualified graduates to teach Arabic or work for the Ministry of Education, but enabled a number of prominent graduates to contribute significantly to the modernization of Arabic and Islam.

For information about other projects, including those focusing on Islamic authority and female Islamic leadership, see http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sant1959/.

Yvette K Khoury - Diminishing Authority in Shakespeare’s ‘Afterlife’: Towards a ‘Customised’ Arabic Drama

The dissertation examines the works of early Arabic Shakespeareans and demonstrates the ‘customising’ approaches of three Arabic playwrights who were informed Shakespeare recipients; they either read him in English or had access to authoritative Arabic translations of his plays. They are the Egyptian poet, politician and playwright ‘Aziz Abazah (1898-1973) (Julius Caesar, 1963); the Syrian man of letters (scholar, translator, journalist, poet and playwright), Mamduh ‘Adwan (1941-2004) (Hamlet, 1976); and the British-Kuwaiti playwright and theatre director Sulayman al-Bassam (b. 1972) (Hamlet, 2002-04 and Richard III, 2007-09). Focusing on the concept of ‘educating princes’, they dramatise ‘how not to rule’ by targeting Arab rulers, including Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir (Abazah), Muhammad Anwar al-Sadat (‘Adwan), and Saddam Husayn (al-Bassam). Each uses different ‘customising’ tools by which he makes Shakespeare ‘fit’ different historical moments relating to Arab politics on local (Abazah), regional (‘Adwan) and global (al-Bassam) scales. These Arabic playwrights use Shakespeare to express their own anxieties about Arab politics at particular historical moments in the Middle East. Their ‘customised’ pieces draw on the authority of Shakespeare’s canon to establish themselves as new historicised artistic expressions in the ‘afterlife’ of his works. Arabic writers simultaneously diminish Shakespeare’s authority and, paradoxically, help elevate his status with the new ‘customised’ pieces they produce.

Leire Olabarria - The Role of Extended Families in Egypt during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom

My research examines the ancient Egyptian kinship system and the processes underlying group formation. In Egypt, the reduced kinship terminology is difficult to reconcile with the salience of extended families. This tension is latent in the sources, since some (e.g. teachings) emphasise the nuclear family, while others (e.g. stelae) display larger social groupings. I explore this conflict between the ‘ideal’ and ‘real’ sphere.

Extended families should be regarded as the main articulating principle of society. Their nature, however, must be reassessed because Western preconceptions, based on biological relatedness, colour how we approach non-Western kinship systems. For Egypt, features other than ‘blood’ may have been relevant to the constitution of groups.

I draw on anthropological theories and methods to analyse sources for the family from the First Intermediate Period until the end of the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2150-1650 BC). Patterns of display of kin on stelae changed during the Middle Kingdom and the stelae owner came to be accompanied by larger and larger groups of people. Previous research traced the roots of this transformation to the First Intermediate Period. Did a revalorisation of social groups occur in a time of crisis in central government? Only a detailed analysis of kinship structures may provide an answer.

Luigi Prada - Dream interpretation and its sociocultural context in Roman Egypt: Edition of an unpublished dream interpretation handbook in Demotic

My thesis involves the reconstruction and first edition of an unpublished Demotic oneirocriticon, or dream interpretation handbook, from the temple libraries of the Fayum (Soknopaiou Nesos and Tebtunis in particular) and dating to the late II or III century AD. Fragments of different copies of this text are held in papyrus collections worldwide: several have already been identified in those of Berlin, Vienna, and Yale University, and I am currently surveying other Demotic papyrus collections in the search for further fragments.

The hundreds of entries in this handbook, describing possible situations and objects sighted in dreams, are a goldmine for Demotic lexicography, since they include rare or as yet unattested words. Moreover, the existence of several different copies of this manual will improve our knowledge of scribal traditions for late Roman Demotic technical and literary texts.

The reconstructed text will be a very important source of information about dream interpretation in the mixed social and cultural milieu of Roman Egypt. This will be discussed in the context of earlier Egyptian divination practices and the contemporary evidence from Graeco-Roman Egypt, as presented by the archaeological and textual evidence, in both Demotic and Greek.

Shadaab Rahemtulla - Through the Eyes of Justice: A Comparative Study of Liberationist and Feminist Readings of the Qur'an

My doctoral dissertation explores the emergence of liberation theology and feminist theology in Islam. By critically analysing the theological works of five Muslim intellectuals – namely, Farid Esack in South Africa; Asghar Ali Engineer in India; Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas in the United States; and Gamal al-Banna in Egypt – my thesis underscores a remarkable convergence in their religious discourses, despite their markedly different geographical contexts: they not only foreground social justice and the struggle against oppression, but they also uphold the primacy of the Qur’an as the authoritative text of the faith. An important intellectual development in contemporary Muslim circles, then, is that Islam has increasingly become a liberating, theological language for Muslims living and dying in structures of inequality, speaking forcefully to contexts of suffering such as poverty, patriarchy and racism, and the Qur’an in particular – as opposed to other Islamic texts like the reported actions and sayings of Prophet Muhammad (hadith) or the inherited legal tradition (shari’a) – has become the prime hermeneutical medium through which this religious discourse of resistance is being articulated. My dissertation seeks to document this phenomenon.

Eskandar Sadeghi - Liberalizing Shi’ism: The Political-Theology of Iran’s Post-Revolutionary Religious Intellectuals (Soroush, Kadivar, Mojtahed-Shabestari, Malekian)

Fatemeh Shams Esmaeili - Transformation of Ideology in Post-Revolutionary Persian Poetry: Case Study of Qaysar Aminpour

Scholarly works in the field of Persian poetry, particularly in the Western academic world are mostly confined to detailed research on renowned classical Persian poets such as Rumi, Hāfez and Saʿdi  and famous modern poets such as Ahmad Shāmlu, Forugh Farrokhzād and Sohrāb Sepehri. Moreover, when such literary criticism reaches the revolutionary era, they seem to have merely narrowed their focus to concentrate only on leftist trends within the Iranian literary culture .

Attention to post-revolutionary Persian poetry and the analysis of prominent poets of this literary epoch has been largely neglected in both Persian-speaking and non-Persian-speaking academia. Although the relationship between the ideology of the pre-revolutionary ruling system and the literary works of the poets and writers of that era has been tackled in a number of academic works , the significant relationship between the ruling ideology and literature during the post-revolutionary period has not received the attention it deserves. This DPhil thesis attempts to shed light on this relationship with specific reference to the early life and poetry of Qaysar Aminpur.

David Zakarian - Women in Medieval Armenia (IV-XI centuries)

My research aims at filling in a big lacuna in Armenian studies concerning the position and role women played in medieval Armenian largely patriarchal society through an interdisciplinary study of their representation in literature and the fine arts. Its focus is on the period from the 4th to 11th centuries.

Undoubtedly, women, predominantly of noble descent, wielded some influence in the society of medieval Armenia, an observation supported by both archaeological and literary evidence. A thorough study of both textual and non-textual material may provide us with unique insights in the way the Armenian society functioned.

The research will attempt to answer several important questions: How much power was allocated to women in Armenian society according to ideological norms? Was their social status determined by the one of their fathers’ or husbands’ (as in medieval Europe)? Did they have the right to inherit or own property? Could they receive education? How are they presented by the patriarchy and what feminine ideals are promoted by predominantly male authors? Finally, to what extent did their position in the discourse of power allowed them to contribute and shape that society?

South and Inner Asia

Brenda Li - A critical study of the life of the 13th-century Tibetan monk U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal based on his biographies

U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal (1230-1309) was a great adept of the bKa’ brgyud school of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly renowned for his knowledge of the Kālacakra Tantra and the unique teaching known as The Approach and Accomplishment of the Three Vajras, said to be given to him in a vision by Vajrayoginī in U rgyan the Miraculous Land (in present-day Pakistan). He was also a great traveller who journeyed widely across and beyond Tibet. He met Qubilai Khan in the Yuan capital in China and visited sacred Buddhist sites in South India. However, despite the historical and religious significance of U rgyan pa Rin chen dpal, his biography has not been given attention proportionate to his achievements. His life stories are only briefly mentioned in earlier historical and religious records and modern publications while access to the manuscripts containing his biographies and written works is extremely exclusive. My thesis is a critical study of his life based on ten versions of his biographies, most of which are hitherto unknown to the public.

Megan Robb - Sufism, Medias, and Muslim Networks: The Changing Relationship Media and Muslim Identity

Greg Seton - The Transcendence of Wisdom in 8,000 lines according to Ratnākaraśānti

Ratnākaraśānti (eleventh century) is one of the most important systematizers of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought. His magnum opus, known as The Quintessence (Sāratamā) is one of the two most important commentaries on the oldest Mahāyāna scriptures, known as Transcendence of Wisdom in 8,000 lines (Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā). Since it has never been translated into a Western language nor studied in depth by a Western scholar, I will present a new Sanskrit critical edition and annotated translation, with an detailed study of this work, based on a philological comparison of eleventh and thirteenth century Sanskrit manuscripts and the eleventh century Tibetan translations.  In my analysis, I will also identify the particular features of Ratnākaraśānti’s unique interpretation and track their unacknowledged, yet formidable, influence on subsequent Buddhist thinkers in both India and Tibet.

Rachael Stevens - Red Tārā: Lineages of Literature and Practice

Tārā is arguably the most popular goddess of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon. Despite this, her numerous red forms have long been overlooked in popular and academic literature on the goddess. This thesis aims to redress this balance.

This thesis surveys the literary and practice lineages of Red Tārā throughout Tibetan Buddhist history. With the intention of examining individual forms of Red Tārā, distinct from Kurukullā (who has received previous scholarly attention). Section One provides a general introduction to Tārā and Kurukullā, followed by a survey of the literature pertaining to Red Tārā identified in the course of this research. Section Two takes four literary lineages of Red Tārā as its focus: Pīṭheśvarī, Sa-skya-pa, the Twenty-one Tārās, and A-paṃ gter-ton's gter-ma cycle, and present them in historical order, from the eleventh to twentieth centuries. Section Three deals with modern-day practice of the goddess in the Chagdud Gonpa Foundation and the Flaming Jewel Sangha.

This thesis relies on translation of primary Tibetan materials in order to discuss subjugation rituals, iconography, the body­-maṇḍala, the adoption of Buddhism in the West, and New Religious Movements, adding to current knowledge on the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon.

East Asia

Yuen Lai Winnie Chan - Garden Culture of Qing Dynasty China

Marshall Craig - Worldview and National Identity in China, Korea and Japan: a transnational microhistory of the Imjin War, 1592-1598

In 1592 Japanese forces landed on the Korean peninsula with the express intent of no less than capturing Beijing and replacing China as the political and cultural hegemon of the known world.  The result was a devastating war involving China, Korea, and Japan, that had profound social, economic, political, and even linguistic ramifications.  The conflict represented a clash of worldviews and of communities.  As a powerful instance of international interaction, it offers a window through which to view perceptions of the country and of the world in pre-modern East Asia.

Building on the vast body of diaries, letters, and histories left to us by participants in the war from all three countries, my research looks at how polity, territory and culture were perceived as elements of group identity.   I combine linguistic analysis of groups of texts with case studies of individual witness accounts in order to capture the diversity of worldview demonstrated by writers from different areas and social positions – from the supreme commander to the slave.   The project will give contextualised and well-evidenced insight into changing ideas of the international order and of the nation in the era prior to the rise of nationalism in China, Korea, and Japan.

刘倩 Qian Liu - Translated Love Fictions during the Late Qing and Early Republican Period and the Modernity of Chinese Literature

I shall mainly look at the condition of late Qing early Republican Chinese translation of foreign literature, particularly novels about love. I am collecting first hand materials about works that were translated and to what extent they were altered during the translation process. I wish to go still further by questioning what kind of cultural characteristic is revealed, how translators fought with, conquered or were otherwise overwhelmed by the original fiction and how this experience influenced their own literary creation. To go still further, I want to examine the modernization of Chinese literature from the perspective of love fiction translation, as love, other than detective or political issues, reaches closer to people's inner self, thus able to produce more profound and direct influence on people's way of thinking.

陸志鴻 Gary Chi-hung Luk - Boat and Fishing Populations in Southeastern China in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

My research interests lie in the history of boat-dwellers and fishermen scattered along the coasts and waterways in Guangdong and Fujian provinces in the mid-nineteenth century. At that time they lived in a region where lineages, secret societies, rebel and piratical groups intertwined, and Sino-Western encounters took place. The geographical, political and socio-economic settings combined together to situate the vast boatmen at the margins of traditional Chinese society, of the underworld, and of Western imperialism in China. My doctoral project is to explore this marginal water world and bridge it to the external wars and internal unrests which then characterised southeastern China and the whole country at large.

Lik Hang Tsui 徐力恒 - The Social and Cultural Uses of Letters in Imperial China: Focusing on Developments in Southern Song (1127-1279)

This doctoral dissertation will focus on how elites in Song China exchanged political and personal information by sending letters to others and how the genre of letters was transformed by writers. The writing of personal letters has been an archaic practice in China’s history, yet epistolary practices were never stagnant and had a considerable impact on the culture and social exchanges of the literatus. By analyzing epistolary manuals (shuyi 書儀 and the like), extant manuscript letters, engraved calligraphy models (fatie 法帖), and transmitted texts from collections from the Southern Song dynasty, this dissertation will show that letters has not only become an increasingly important genre at that time, but has also become more involved in the construction of a common knowledge and the transmission of philosophical and religious ideas. This research seeks to contribute to our understanding of underexplored epistolary sub-genres in the Chinese literary tradition and to shed light on the social history of epistolary communication.

Zixi You - Split intransitivity in Old Japanese

Since the formulation of Perlmutter’s Unaccusative Hypothesis, which divides intransitive verbs into ‘unaccusatives’ and ‘unergatives’, split intransitivity has received a great deal of attention among linguists. However, little attention has been dedicated to Asian languages or dead languages. Within the larger project Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese, my DPhil research fills the gap by investigating the lexical-semantic aspects of split intransitivity in relation to their morpho-syntactic expressions and exploring to what extent intransitive verbs can be classified as unaccusative and unergative in Old Japanese (OJ). Syntactically, I look into diagnostics specific to OJ (e.g., auxiliary selection) alongside diagnostics which show split intransitivity in modern Japanese (e.g., resultative construction, VP-preposing, NV-compounds, light verb suru construction, etc.); semantically, I investigate the interaction between factors including agentivity, volitionality, affectedness and telicity. The descriptive and analytical work of the research is based on the VSARPJ Corpus (an electronic database including major OJ texts with various grammatical, especially syntactic, information in the form of xml tags following TEI conventions) which we are creating for the larger project. The results of this research are expected to contribute to a detailed description of OJ verbs, while having implications for linguistic theory in general.