Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses: Sensory Readings of Persian Literature and Culture represents a new approach to the study of Persian literature and Iranian cultural history. The chapters contained in this volume direct Persian cultural production toward the ‘sensory turn’ in the humanities and often offer an alternative to the dominance of strict socio-political approaches to Persian literary and cultural studies. Taken together, the chapters in Losing Our Minds, Coming to Our Senses offer a fresh look at a range of Persian poetics read through the sensoria of texts. The starting point for each chapter in the volume was the following question: How can the traditional senses be activated using text- or image-based cultural products? In answering that question, each chapter takes a distinct approach to the sensory effects of consuming texts, while also highlighting vital connections between sensorial aesthetics and politics. They carve out and define new spaces and directions for the study of Persian cultural production. The chapters in this volume, arranged in an order that is roughly chronological according to the main text(s) being analyzed, offer readings that pay close attention to the senses and bring to the fore the sounds, tastes, smells, textures, and sights of Persian cultural texts.

Such introductory projects, by nature, resist the kind of uniformity that one would expect from similar projects done in more developed fields and subfields. Here, we bring together a variety of approaches and styles, from descriptive to theoretical, and from lyrical to political, to demonstrate the many possible directions along which this subfield could develop further. Michael Beard's introduction provides a unique rationale for juxtaposing these essays by emphasizing their intertextual and/or conceptual connections. The Introduction, however, does not seek to impose an artificial uniformity on the volume and, quite to the contrary, it underlines the theoretical and stylistic autonomy of each chapter.

Several people, institutions and forums made the completion of this book possible. To begin with, our friends and colleagues at New York University and Rutgers University were some of the first to hear about many of the ideas presented in the following pages and offered constructive feedback and support to help bring this collection of articles together as a book.