Department of History
University of South Carolina, 211 Gambrell Hall
Columbia
SC
29208
United States
ABOUT
Matthew Melvin-Koushki (PhD Yale) is Associate Professor of Islamic History at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in early modern Islamicate intellectual and imperial history, with a philological focus on the theory and practice of the occult sciences in Timurid-Safavid Iran and the broader Persianate world to the nineteenth century, and a disciplinary focus on history of science, history of philosophy and history of the book through the lens of the Islamic Weird. His several forthcoming books include The Lettrist Treatises of Ibn Turka: Persian Pythagoreanism and Occult Imperialism in the Timurid Renaissance and The Occult Science of Empire in Early Modern Iran: Four Persian Lettrists and Their Manuals of Magic, and he is co-editor of the volumes Islamicate Occultism: New Perspectives (2017) and Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice (2021). President of Societas Magica, he is also cofounder of the international working group Islamic Occult Studies on the Rise (IOSOTR), at islamicoccult.org, and Co-PI of the ERC Synergy project MOSAIC: Mapping Occult Sciences Across Islamicate Cultures (2025-2031).
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
13th-18th Centuries
Central Asian Studies
Iranian Studies
Islamic Studies
Persian
Geographic Areas of Interest
Anatolia
Central Asia
Egypt
India
Iran
Specialties
Occult Sciences
History Of Philosophy-Science
Early Modern Persianate Empires
Languages
Arabic (advanced)
Persian (advanced)
Education
PhD
| 2012
| Islamic Studies
| Yale University
MPhil
| 2009
| Islamic Studies
| Yale University
MA
| 2008
| Islamic Studies
| Yale University
BA
| 2004
| Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
| University of Virginia
