austinomalley

Austin O’Malley (PhD University of Chicago, 2017) is a scholar of Persian literature with a focus on didacticism and religious poetry. His first book, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ‘Attar and Persian Sufi Didacticism (Edinburgh UP, 2023) shows how ‘Attar’s poems idealize their own reception and implicitly theorize their poetic work; it thereby uncovers an emic poetics of didacticism in which speech is likened to a medicine, affecting the bodies, hearts, and souls of its listeners over and above any purely communicative function. He has also published on hagiography, Sufi ritual practice, and the modern global reception of Persian verse.