Jeson is a PhD candidate with interests in race, identity, translation, and knowledge-making in the pre-modern Islamicate world. His dissertation intervenes at the intersection of Arabic, Persian, and (traces of) Turkish poetics in Iran and Iraq during the Great Saljuq period (1040–1194). At this inflectional time and space in Islamicate history, the incumbent racial hierarchy, topped by Arabs and undergirded by Arabic letters, was challenged by an ascendant Persianate cultural prestige propelled by the Saljuq Turks. Jeson’s research investigates the choices newly available to the multilingual, multiracial Saljuq poets active during this period of flux, when various genealogies and categories of identity were reconfigured in panegyric poetry just as other more experimental poetic forms emerged.
His commitment to bringing pre-modern Arabic literature into conversation with comparative fields of inquiry resulted in an article in Al-Masāq entitled “Women of the Crusades: The Constructedness of the Female Other, 1100–1200.” In it, he compares twelfth-century Crusader-era texts in Old French and Arabic, exploring how motifs of race and gender helped sustain a religio-ideological conflict that was neither necessary nor inevitable. While reading for a BA in Arabic and French at the University of Cambridge, Jeson had the opportunity to study in Beirut, Palestine, and Amman. At UChicago, he is a Neubauer Family Distinguished Doctoral Fellow and his research in manuscript archives is supported by the Nicholson Center for British Studies.