Michael Pifer

Michael Pifer is a medievalist, a specialist in comparative literature, and an avid reader of premodern poetry from around the world. A curiosity about Persian and Turkish loanwords in medieval Armenian literature eventually led him to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, where he received three Avery Hopwood Awards for his creative non-fiction writing.

His book, Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (Yale University Press, 2021), sheds light on intersecting cultures of literary production between Muslims and Christians in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Pifer is also the coeditor of An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and coeditor of a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, titled Entangled Literatures and Histories in the Premodern Ottoman World. His writings on Armenian culture have appeared in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, and Medieval Encounters.