Dr. Jonathan Brack is a post-doctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows (from 2017), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his dissertation (titled "Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran") at the Department of History in The University of Michigan in the summer of 2016.
His research examines cross-cultural contact and exchange across Asia and Iran, with a focus on the transmission of discourses on authority and sacral kingship during the period of Mongol rule (13-14th centuries) and the early modern period. He is currently working on two book projects: "Debating the Fate of Chinggis Khan's Soul: Religious Polemics, Court Disputations, and the Conversion of Souls in Medieval Iran," which investigates imaginations of the thereafter as sites of Muslim and Buddhist translation, polemics, dialogue and conversion; and "Theologies of Auspicious Kingship: The Cult of Chinggis Khan and Sacral Muslim Kingship in Medieval-Early Modern Iran and Asia," which studies the fashioning of new discourses on authority and legitimacy in Mongol-ruled Iran as a part of a larger story of how cross-cultural exchanges and appropriations formulated a shared political language for empire-building projects across Asia, and thus, promoted inter-Asian integration.