Homepage
Books
The Persian Mirror explores France’s preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle the Persian ambassador’s visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.
Winner of the Iran World Book Award 2022
Journal Articles & Book Chapters
“Mise en scène du lointain et propaganda: la publication du voyage de l’ambassadeur de Perse” [“Publishing the Diplomatic Journey of Mohammad Reza Beg’s Embassy to Louis XIV’s France in 1715],” in Une diplomatie des lointains: la France face à la mondialisation des rivalités internationales, XVIIe XVIIIe siècles [A Distant Diplomacy: France in Confrontation with the Globalization of International Rivalries], edited by Éric Schnakenbourg et François Ternat (Presses Universitaires de Rennes,
September 2020)
“Finding Common Ground between Europe and Asia: Understanding and Conflict during the Persian Embassy to France in 1715,” Journal of Early Modern History 16:1 (January 2012)
Book Reviews and Essays
Review of Junko Thérèse Takeda, Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters, Journal of World History (March 2023)
Review of Au cœur de l’État: Parlement(s) et cours souveraines sous l’Ancien Régime. Isabelle Brancourt, ed. Constitution de la modernité 20 Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2020. Renaissance Quarterly (Summer 2022)
Three-book review essay of Jurgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia; Michael C. Carhart, Leibniz Discovers Asia: Social Networking in the Rebuplic of Letters; and Geoffrey C. Gunn, Overcoming Ptolemy: The Revelation of an Asian World Region in Journal of World History (December, 2020)
Review of Faith E. Beasley, Versailles Meets the Taj Mahal: François Bernier, Marguerite de la Sablière, and Enlightening Conversations in Seventeenth-Century France, on H-France Reviews (October 1, 2019)