This paper analyzes the role of one of the earliest ‘modern’ Iranian histories of Persian prose, Muhammad-Taqi Bahar’s landmark Sabkshinasi (“Stylistics,” 1942 CE), in the emergence of the University of Tehran’s Department of Persian Literature, and, more broadly, the place of this literary history and the discipline of Persian literature in the Pahlavi modernization project. Sabkshinasi was composed by Bahar (1884-1951, also known by his title ‘Malik al-Shu`ara’ or Poet Laureate) after the Ministry of Culture requested a textbook be compiled for doctoral students of Persian literature. Treating Sabkshinasi as part of the state project of modernization, I examine how tropes of modernity, such as the urge towards categorization, manifest themselves in Bahar’s view of literary history in similar ways to his European sources of influence, such as the German Orientalist Ernst Herzfeld’s model of Iranian art history. I thus demonstrate how the emergence of Persian literature as a ‘modern’ discipline, or what Bahar calls the “new science” of literary criticism, separately bounded from other kinds of knowledge, reflects the breakup of traditional knowledge production into distinct sciences in Europe, as described by Foucault in The Order of Things. I also consider the relationship between Bahar’s text and the built environment it serves, comparing how this modern literary history functions in service of its physical location (the Department of Persian Literature) to the relationship between pre-modern tazkira literary histories and Sufi shrines. Through doing so, I argue for a close connection between Bahar's Persian literary history, the University of Tehran Department of Persian Literature, and the Pahlavi state's efforts towards constructing an Iranian modernity.