About the Lecture It’s easy to compare things that are produced near each other, by people who are able to influence each other. Traditionally, comparative literature has therefore compared literatures in close contact with each other: at first European literatures; later literatures in European languages around the world, and sometimes even contemporary literatures in non-European...
This conference (online and onsite) brings together scholars to consider different manuscript communities in Europe, their textual and iconographic traditions, and more globally, an exploration of communities that produced “families” of Hebrew manuscripts and enabled transmissions across languages and societies. Motivation to organize this conference stems from The J. Paul Getty Museum’s recent acquisition of...
The sensory turn in many areas of the humanities has failed to make a significant impression on Islamic and Middle East Studies, and on the study of Islamic history in particular. In the last couple of years, however, there has been a rise in interest in historical manifestations of the Muslim sensorium. This is demonstrated...
A lecture by Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University). Ecclesiastical history began in the 1550s, when the Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus organized a collaborative century-by-century history of Christianity. This confessional project never reached completion, and its thick volumes met with severe criticism from co-religionists as well as Catholics. Nonetheless, it provided a new model for the...
Dominic Brookshaw (Oxford University) "Zulaykha’s Redemption: From Lustful Villain to Female Icon" The guile associated with Zulaykha in the Qur’an is largely absent from her depiction in the ghazals of fourteenth-century Iran. The negativity surrounding Zulaykha’s expression (or manifestation) of female sexuality dims in the Persian ghazal where we witness the character’s salvific rehabilitation. On...
The Annual Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture In the late third and fourth centuries, a number of men and women from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria chose to make a daring break with society, renouncing their familial claims and wealth so that they could lead a life of perfection in the desert....
Leili Anvar (Sorbonne, Paris) "From the Desert of Arabia to the Gardens of Herat: Wanderings of Majnûn, the Poet-Lover" In this presentation, we will follow Majnûn in his journeys from the Arabic poems to the great Persian masnavis (composed by Nezâmi, Amir Khosrow Dehlavi and Jâmi). We shall see how -with the development of sufism and...
Prashant Keshavmurthy (McGill University) "Reading Nizāmī Ganjavī as a Novelist" Neither the Byzantines nor the Persians had any generic name for the Greek and Persian novels that were composed in the 12th century. Beholden to older (Attic Greek and Abbasid Arabic) models, the taxonomies of literary forms in both geographically adjacent literary cultures lagged behind the...
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER About the Lecture I would like first to question the benefit that specialists of Greco-Roman slavery can gain from dialogue with the historians of slavery from other periods. Considering the question of the relationship between debt, servitude and slavery in archaic Greece, I will first show how recent approaches in the...
Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to come across best in black-and-white. The recent release of a stunning new version of this blood-soaked tragedy, directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, has spurred renewed interest in the play and its history in film. Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's 1957 Japanese reworking of Macbeth (also...
The caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193/809) allegedly led the ḥajj nine times over the course of his twenty-three-year reign, in 188/804 he was also the last ʿAbbāsid caliph to lead the pilgrimage rites. The pilgrimage served as a means of legitimation as well as a place of succession and nomination, with Hārūn and his wife Zubayda bt....
Justine Landau (Sorbonne) "An Epic Tribute to the Lyric Poem" Poetry does things with words. In the premodern world, this fact is perhaps nowhere acknowledged more unanimously than in the Persianate sources. Chief among the arts of language, lyric poetry is associated with “licit magic,” after the Arabic saying, since its mastery is said to...
The Spring 2022 session of the California Medieval History Seminar will take place at its original venue, the Huntington Library. The seminar meets to discuss four pre-distributed research papers Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss...
Julia Rubanovich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents an online lecture titled "The Tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā through the Eyes of a Jewish Poet". This talk will examine a string of episodes from the tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā embedded into the “Book of Genesis” (Bereshit-nāma), a biblical poem composed by the fourteenth-century Judeo-Persian poet...
Paul Losensky (Indiana University) "A Common Thread: Three Literary Careers in Early Modern Persia, England, and Spain" The emergence of the concept of the Global Renaissance has brought new attention to the political, diplomatic, economic, and artistic connections between major civilizational centers in the early modern period. For the most part, however, literature has remained...
A conference organized by the officers of UCLA MEMSA: Chase Caldwell Smith (History), Richard Ibarra (History), and Stefanie Matabang (Comparative Literature) Keynote Speakers: Roland Betancourt (UC Irvine) and Nicholas R. Jones (UC Davis) Research on the premodern intersection of race, gender, and sexuality has steadily increased as a result of the efforts of a diverse group of scholars working across traditional periodization and geographic limits....
Shahzad Bashir (Brown University) "The Market in Poetry in the Persian World" Iranian 250, “Persian Literature in English Translation: Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” taught by Associate Professor Domenico Ingenito (NELC), offers a survey of medieval and early modern Persian literature in English translation. The seminar fosters interdisciplinary conversations among graduate students from a plurality of departments and...
A roundtable organized and moderated by Professor Giulia Sissa (Departments of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Classics, UCLA). “Decolonizing Classics” is a novel challenge for scholars in the Humanities and, even more pointedly, for those who study the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. The stake is not merely relevance, usefulness or epistemic legitimacy, but...
This conference brings together a diverse group of scholars to evaluate the state of research regarding the evolving inter-relationships of Christians, Jews, and Muslims within premodern Iberia and explore the lasting influence of this paradigm shift. The intended emphasis is on the intersection of quotidian mechanisms and longer-term (statutory, theological, sociological) trajectories. By what means...
Join us for our Open House and New Book Salon with ELIZABETH MORRISON, Senior Curator of Manuscripts at The J. Paul Getty Museum, and writer BOYD MORRISON, for a discussion of their new book, The Lawless Land (Tales of the Lawless Land Book 1). New Book Salon 4:30 – 5:30 pm Pacific Time Onsite in Royce 306 and...