Fields
Central Asia
Russia and Soviet Union
Persianate Islam
Digital Humanities
Teaching
Empires of the Steppe
Imperial Russia
Rise of Islam
Digital Methods
- PhD, Princeton University, 2015
Education & Training
- Kluge Fellow, Library of Congress, 2023
- Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellowship (2017-2018)
- Post-Doctoral Associate for the InterAsia Initiative at Yale University (2015-2016)
- Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2014-2015)
- Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship (2013-2014)
- Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (2012-2013)
Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch: Sovereignty, Paperwork, and Colonialism in Bukhara (Cornell University Press, forthcoming).
Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020).
“The Watchmaker: Entangled Histories of Eurasia’s 19th Century Viewed through the Prism of a Traveler’s Odyssey,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 24, no. 3 (2023): 611–34.
“Written into Submission: Reassessing Sovereignty through a Forgotten Eurasian Dynasty,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (June 2018).
"Categorically Misleading, Dialectically Misconceived: Language Textbooks and Pedagogic Participation in Central Asian Nation-Building Projects,” Central Asian Survey (December 2017). Adapted for a general audience in “On Language: The Many Flavors of Persian in Eurasia,” EurasiaNet, October 11, 2017.
“Nadir Shah’s Peculiar Central Asian Legacy: Empire, Conversion Narratives, and the Rise of New Scholarly Dynasties.” International Journal of Middle East Studies (July 2016).
“Soviet Civilization Through a Persian Lens: Iranian Intellectuals, Cultural Diplomacy and Socialist Modernity 1941-1955.” Iranian Studies (September 2015).
James Pickett focuses on empire and Islam as entangled sources of authority, with particular attention to historical memory and state formation.
His first monograph, Polymaths of Islam, examines transregional networks of exchange among religious scholars in the Central Asian city-state of Bukhara. Through mastery of arcane disciplines, these multi-talented intellectuals enshrined their city as a peerless center of Islam, and thereby elevated themselves into the halls of power.
A second book, Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch, explores the nature of sovereignty and cultures of documentation through the prism of semi-colonialism in the Eurasian borderlands. It examines the paper trail left behind by the Bukharan protectorate to assess the ways Russian “protection” transformed the Perso-Islamic state on the eve of Revolution.
