Fields
Central Eurasian History
Russian and Soviet History
Persianate Islam
James Pickett focuses on empire and Islam as entangled sources of authority, with particular attention to historical memory and state formation.
His Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), 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.
His second book, Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch: Sovereignty and Scribal Culture in Colonial Bukhara (Cornell University Press, 2025), follows the paperwork of Bukhara's half-century as a Russian protectorate. Bridging the gap between a Perso-Islamic court and a colonial empire demanded scribes who commanded both the Islamic literary arts and an encyclopedic knowledge of Russian imperial society; in their documents, sovereignty was negotiated line by line.
A new project, Seeing Like a Princely State, compares Bukhara's trajectory with that of the Indian princely state of Hyderabad, a parallel Perso-Islamic polity under British "protection," with continued attention to cultures of documentation in relation to the state.
Education & Training
- PhD, Princeton University, 2015
Representative Publications
Russian Subject, Muslim Monarch: Sovereignty and Scribal Culture in Colonial Bukhara (Cornell University Press, 2025)
Polymaths of Islam: Power and Networks of Knowledge in Central Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020)
“The Darker Side of Mobility: Refugees, Hostages, and Political Prisoners in Persianate Asia,” in Asia Inside Out: Itinerant People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019).
“Written into Submission: Reassessing Sovereignty through a Forgotten Eurasian Dynasty,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 3 (June 2018).
“Mobilizing Magic: Occultism in Central Asia and the Continuity of High Persianate Culture under Russian Rule,” co-authored with Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Studia Islamica, no. 111 (November 2016).
“Enemies beyond the Red Sands: The Bukhara-Khiva Dynamic as Mediated by Textual Genre,” Journal of Persianate Studies, no. 9 (November 2016).
“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).