Global Philology：An International Lecture Series

Arabic Philology in Cosmopolitan Context

Moderator: Prof. Glenn W. Most, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa/ University of Chicago

Discussants: Prof. Beatrice Gruendler, Freie Universität Berlin

Prof. Isabel Toral, Freie Universität Berlin

Prof. Islam Dayeh, Freie Universität Berlin

Time: 20:00-22:00 (GMT+8), May 18, 2022.

Zoom conference number: 922 3991 6850

Password: 1111

About the discussants:

Beatrice Gruendler (PhD Harvard University), formerly Professor at Yale University (1996-2014) is Professor of Arabic at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of research include Arabic paleography, the history of the Arabic language, classical Arabic poetry and its social context, the integration of modern literary theory into the study of Near Eastern literatures early Arabic book-culture viewed within the history of media, and the interaction of classical Arabic literature with other premodern literatures. Her publications include The Rise of the Arabic Book (2020), The Development of the Arabic Scripts (1993, Arabic trans. 2004), Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron’s Redemption (2003).

Isabel Toral (PhD Tübingen University) is the professor for Arabic studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her areas of research include Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity; cultural history; translation in the Islamicate world and its socio-cultural history; advice literature and adab in Classical Islam. Her publications include Al-Ḥīra. Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (2014), "Factual Narrative in Medieval Arabic Literature" (2017) and “Justice and good administration in medieval Islam” (2021).

Islam Dayeh (PhD Freie Universität Berlin) is the assistant professor of Arabic philology and Islamic intellectual history at Freie Universität Berlin. He is the director of the research programme Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (2010-), and the founding editor of the journal and monograph series Philological Encounters (2016-). His recent publications include: Purity and Order. Islamic Legal Controversies in the Wake of Shabbatai Zwi’s Messianic Movement in Early Modern Yemen (2022); “Philology and Microhistory: A Conversation with Carlo Ginzburg” (2022); Reading Wittgenstein in Arabic (2021, as editor); “From Taṣḥīḥ to Taḥqīq: Toward a History of the Arabic Critical Edition” (2019).

English lecture with simultaneous translations.