The Making of Monsters: Fantastical Fictions from the Medieval Middle East to the Modern World (Lasman & Pellegrino)

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The medieval Middle East is a potent site for fantastical narratives. This legacy originates in the literary and scientific cultures of classical Arabic and Persian. Texts like the Shahnama and the Jābirian corpus exerted a major influence on cultures beyond the Middle East, one which continues into the fantasy media of the present. 

In this episode, Sam Lasman (University of Oregon) and Samantha Pellegrino (University of Chicago) explore the origins and offspring of the Islamicate fantastic by putting medieval and modern texts in dialogue. This conversation demonstrates how audiences can access a richer understanding of the political and intellectual value of fantasy by engaging with the roots of occult scientific practices, ancient myths, and horror stories. In tracing these processes, modern artists gain the ability to engage more authentically and innovatively with premodern narratives and ideas in contemporary creations. 

Sam begins by discussing the div of Persian mythology and their transformations across millennia of religious and cultural change. He then turns to a contemporary Iranian horror movie, tracing connections between supernatural beings and ideology. Samantha then takes up the alchemical creation of “artificial” life, and a modern novel in which the devastation of the Iraq War conjures a new, monstrous being. The conversation then closes with broader meditations on the politics of scholarship and the role of difference in modern speculative fiction. 

Sam Lasman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the nonhuman, parahuman, and monstrous in medieval literary cultures, especially from the British Isles and the Iranian world. He is the recipient of a 2024 ACLS Fellowship for a project titled “Colonizing the Otherworld: Scientific Racism and the Medieval Parahuman,” and an alumnus of the Clarion Science Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop Class of 2022. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in venues including JGEP, Viator, Arthuriana, postmedieval, Exemplaria, Interfaces, and several edited volumes. 

Samantha Pellegrino received her PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2025 and works as a Major Gifts Officer for the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) at the University of Chicago. Her scholarship centers on magic, making, and medieval Islamic alchemy, as well as the historiography of the occult sciences. She is the recipient of the inaugural 2025 History of Science Society John E. Murdoch Prize for her paper “The Takwīn-Machine: Artifice, Artificiality, Imitation, and Wonder in Jābirian Instructions for the Alchemical Creation of New Life.” Her academic work has appeared or is forthcoming in postmedieval and the Micrologus’ Library series, and she was featured on the Ottoman History Podcast in 2025 alongside New York Times bestselling author Shannon Chakraborty in a roundtable on contemporary fantasy and the history of magic. 

Further reading:

Primary Sources:

• Balʿamī, Amīrak. Tārīkhnāma-yi Ṭabarī, ed. Muḥammad Rawshan (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Intishār-i Surūsh, 1392 [2013].

  • (No English translation)

• Firdawsī, Abū al-Qāsim. Shāhnāma, vols. 1–7, ed. Jalāl Khāliqī-Muṭlaq (New York: Bibliotheca Persica, 1988-2008).

  • English translation: Abolqasem Ferdowsi, Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, trans. Dick Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

• Ibn Ḥayyān, Jābir. Mukhtār al-Rasā’il, ed. Paul Kraus (al-Khānjī, 1935).

  • (No full English translation—see O'Connor 1994 for selections.)

• Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein fi-l Baghdad (Beirut-Baghdad: Dar Al-Jamal, 2013)

  • English translation: Saadawi, Ahmed. Frankenstein in Baghdad. trans. Jonathan Wright (Penguin Random House, 2018).

• Under the Shadow (Zīr-i Sāya), dir. Babak Anvari (2016).

Secondary Sources/Further Reading:

• Cross, Cameron. “How to tame a dragon: The ontology of evil in early Persian epic,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 16 (2025), pp. 5–35.

• Ehrmantraut, Brigid. “In similtudinem fertae: Mythologization of Burial Mounds in Irish and Hiberno-Latin Literature,” Quaestio Insularis 20 (2019), pp. 72–90.

• El-Zein, Amira. Islam, Arabs & The Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2009).

• Forster, Regula. "Jābir b. Ḥayyān". In K. Fleet, G. Krämer, D. Matringe, J. Nawas and D. J. Stewart (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam Three Online, (Brill, 2018). https://doi-org.proxy.uchicago.edu/10.1163/1573-3912_ei3_COM_32665

• Kraus, Paul. Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Contribution à l’histoire des idées scientifiques dans l’Islam. Cairo: Imprimerie d l’Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1942–43.

• Lasman, Sam. “Otherworld Treasure and Bardic Disguise: Recovering the Past in Medieval Welsh and Persian Literatures.” Viator 51.1 (2020), pp. 159–170.

• Lasman, Sam. “Otherworld Literature: Parahuman Pasts in Classical Persian Historiography and Epic,” inPersian Literature as World Literature, ed. Mostafa Abedinifard, Omid Azadibougar, and Amirhossein Vafa (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), pp. 35–50.

• Leoni, Francesca, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Liana Saif and Farouk Yahya, eds. Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020.

• O’Connor, Kathleen Malone. “The alchemical creation of life (takwīn) and other concepts of Genesis in medieval Islam.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1994.

• Olomi, Ali A. “Jinn in the Qur’an,” in The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an, ed. George Archer, Maria M. Dakake, & Daniel A. Madigan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 145–151.

• Omidsalar, Mahmoud. "DĪV." Encyclopaedia Iranica. Published December 15, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1163/2330-4804_EIRO_COM_8428

• Pierce, Laurie. “Serpents and Sorcery: Humanity, Gender, and the Demonic in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh,” Iranian Studies 48, no. 3 (2015), pp. 349–367.

• “A Sea of Sorcery: Roundtable with Shannon Chakraborty,” The Ottoman History Podcast, November 19, 2025. (https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2025/11/chakraborty.html?m=1)

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