Daniel Jacobius Morgan

5-year old after weekly hair-washing:

"Baba, now I'm going to wash your hai....polish your head."

🥲

And again in the card aisle… #arabicfail

Pile of wooden cats

Tenure application guidelines: your scholarship should constitute a coherent body of work.

My scholarship:

Enjoyed the first episode of Night Manager but it blows my mind that these kinds of error still slip through the cracks… #arabicfail

Strange that this is not yet showing up in most US media...

Bollywood Embraces a Taj Mahal Conspiracy Theory

Debunked Hindutva revisionism, now a Bollywood film.

“What [the film] has done instead is rehash discredited claims that once were relegated to the fringes of the internet, giving prominence to efforts to inflame sectarian tensions”

Gift link

Ferdowsi Summer School of Persianate Languages and Literatures - Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature An intensive four-week summer school designed as a comprehensive introduction to the languages, texts, and cultures of Persianate Asia.

Unique opportunity to study Classical Persian, Urdu, and Chaghatay in Yerevan
ferdowsi.org/ferdowsi-sum...

I'm taking a mandated course on how to recognize student hazing. Hazing can include sleep deprivation, humiliating rituals and implied threats to gain acceptance to an exclusive group.

Unrelatedly, I'm prepping a tenure file on 5-hrs sleep...and if I don't do it right I'll lose my job next year.

The downside is that most of us can’t afford to live in houses with gardens.

One of the best things about living in California is the way people leave out boxes of winter citrus fruit because the trees in their garden produce far more than any household could possibly consume.

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholars Buddhism Public Scholars use their expertise to bolster the capacity of host organizations in the area of Buddhist art and thought.

Call for applications: The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholars program at ACLS—eligible scholars are invited to apply for positions in the US, Canada, and UK by January 27.

Another book to look forward to in 2026!

Mirrors of Empire

And another Alam-Subrahamanyam is also arriving in Feburary...a feast for historians of the Mughal world!

sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mirr...

Islamic Intellectual History in the Mughal World Cambridge Core - South Asian History - Islamic Intellectual History in the Mughal World

Absolutely cannot wait to see this come out next month. The editors - Asad Ahmed and his students at Berkeley - are doing groundbreaking work on the intellectual history of the Timurid/Mughal period...

resolve.cambridge.org/core/books/i...

Bronze Age cymbals from Dahwa: Indus musical traditions in Oman | Antiquity | Cambridge Core Bronze Age cymbals from Dahwa: Indus musical traditions in Oman - Volume 99 Issue 404

Here, the authors present a pair of third-millennium BC copper cymbals, excavated at Dahwa, #Oman ... Not only do the cymbals add to...evidence interpreted in terms of Indus migrants in Early Bronze Age Oman, they also suggest shared musical and potentially ritual practices around the Arabian Gulf.

BOOKS, BINDINGS AND BIBLIOPHILIA IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD: This short course in the codicology of Arabic/Persian manuscripts is coming up at SOAS in February, with fantastic speakers, and I'll be giving the talk on (well, what else?) ink materials and pigments.

www.soas.ac.uk/study/find-c...

If they’re not careful the FIFA Peace Prize is gonna mean nothing

On a personal level it’s been a whirlwind of year: had a child, became a US citizen, presented work in Uzbekistan and Marseille, had two articles published, submitted a translation of an Arabic treatise on dreaming, and taught 100+ students. Hoping 2026 will be slightly less eventful…

Photo of paragraph from Vikram Seth’s Two Lives

Lovely anecdote from Vikram Seth’s Two Lives where he discusses his German Jewish aunt crying after being served Marmite at the home of the famous Islamic studies scholar AJ Arberry where she worked after fleeing Berlin in 1939. #Marmite #Britishdelicacies

Thanks! It’s been a rough 24 hours

The whole family has been struck down with the flu except me so I‘m sitting down to a full roast dinner alone like some kind of millionaire recluse.

Quick check: you’ve told everyone to not vote for Rishi Kumar right?

JOB: TT Assistant Professor, History, Stanford

Modern South Asia
www.higheredjobs.com/faculty/deta...

Trump is scared by the Epstein release - and here's the proof The President has thrown everything he had at distracting from this story and none of it has worked

“What should have been a single, final document dump is instead a steady trickle of releases, each being pored over as it comes out. The latest drop, of some 11,000 documents, came overnight. People will want evidence and the story just keeps getting fed, and becoming bigger.”

“Just fancy that” column from Private Eye showing links between Benioff AI boosterism in Time Magazine and investment

That’s great. Did you end up chatting?

Wrote about the experience here: amp.scroll.in/article/8591...

I spent a week trying to find a single 18th Persian manuscript in an archive missing a wall and in which every book shelved less than three feet from the ground was irreparably damaged by monsoon rain and subsequent mold. I never found the manuscript.

UNC following the inglorious footsteps of Indiana University, currently making big headlines in…football… while gutting world famous area studies and other programs.

A form of censorship more powerful than a mere book ban

Center for European Studies, African Studies Center, Carolina Asia Center, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Institute for the Study of the Americas and Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies are all slated to close.