What you'll learn

• 1 (04:28) **Guest Introduction & Intellectual Journey** - Matthew Miller introduces himself and traces his path from pre-med to Persian literature and digital humanities at the University of Maryland.
• 2 (10:09) **How to Read Sufi Poetry** - Miller explains his literary-studies approach, emphasizing that poems have multiple valid meanings depending on context and reader.
• 3 (15:13) **Defining “Affect” and the “AE” (Affect/Effect)** - Miller introduces his core concepts: affect theory, history of emotions, and his neologism “affect” (AE) to capture both being affected and being effected as a Sufi subject.
• 4 (26:55) **Chapter 1: Embodied Biography of ‘Iraqi** - Miller models how to read a Sufi biography not just for facts or discourse, but for the embodied, felt performance of being a lover.
• 5 (34:25) **Chapters 2 & 3: Sama‘ as Affective Ritual** - Miller explains sama‘ (listening to poetry with music) as the central ritual for understanding Sufi meaning creation and subject formation.
• 6 (42:44) **Why Love Poetry Outperforms the Quran in Sama‘** - Miller discusses al-Ghazali’s controversial claim that love poetry induces ecstasy (wajd) more effectively than Quranic recitation.
• 7 (46:40) **Chapter on Wine: Metaphor as Embodied Similitude** - Miller uses Jāmī’s commentary on Ibn al-Fāriḍ’s wine ode to show how wine imagery works through structural embodied similarity, not just allegory.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app