IFI Guest Lecture by Jonathan Brack | Northwestern University

Abstract: This article examines violence directed at ancestor images and religious change, with particular attention to conversion to Islam, in the Mongol Empire. It situates the desecration of temples, burial sites, and royal remains at the intersection of succession conflicts and competition over the extraction of material and spiritual resources in the Mongol khanates of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.

Jonathan Brack is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Northwestern University. He is the author of An Afterlife for the Khan: Muslims, Buddhists, and Sacred Kingship in Mongol Iran and Eurasia (University of California Press, 2023). He is currently working on a new book titled Logic of Empire: Science, Religion, and the Supernatural in Mongol Eurasia.

The Guest Lecture is open to the public.
Workshop format: discussion based on a pre-circulated paper. To obtain the paper in advance, email nomansland(at)oeaw.ac.at

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