Matthew Melvin-Koushki

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 IOSOTR, at islamicoccult.org.