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Sadegh Ansari is Assistant Professor of History of the Pre-Modern Islamic World at �鶹��ý�Ŷ�. His research interests include the history of science, history of music, and the intellectual history of the pre-modern Islamic and Persianate Worlds. His first monograph, "The Science of Music: Knowledge Production in Medieval Baghdad and Beyond" was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2024. The monograph focuses on the following questions: How did the medieval Islamic intellectual tradition conceptualize and produce scientific knowledge? What can we learn about medieval Islamic civilizations from the way they examined and studied the universe? In answering these fundamental questions, it provides a unique perspective for the study of both musicology and intellectual history. This innovative book raises fascinating questions about how designating music a 'science' rather than an 'art' impacts our understanding of truth, and reconstructs a richly holistic medieval system of knowledge in the process. 

Ansari's current project, tentatively titled "Commentaries, Manuscript Marginalia, and Networks of Musical Knowledge Production in the Medieval and Early Modern Islamic World (13th-19th Centuries)" Focuses on commentaries and manuscript marginalia of two musical treatises from the medieval Islamic world, seeking to answer the following questions: What did networks of scholarly exchange on a scientific discipline in the medieval and early modern Islamic world resemble? In the absence of tools as well as barriers prevalent in the modern world (national academic institutions, borders, laboratories, etc.), how did scientific knowledge circulate over time and space? What can we learn about the educational activities of medieval and early modern scholars by analyzing these commentaries and manuscript marginalia?

Ansari's articles have appeared in the Journal of Abbasid Studies as well as the Journal Philological Encounters. He has been at �鶹��ý�Ŷ�'s History Department since Fall 2020.