From the 14^th to the 26^th of June, 2017, Professor Dana Sajdi from Boston College will visit the Seminar für Semitistik und Arabistik within the framework of the Dahlem Junior Host Program. She has been invited by Rossella De Luca and Colinda Lindermann, who are PhD candidates of the Dahlem Network Junior Resarch Group “Arabic Philology and Textual Practices in the Early Modern Period”. Professor Sajdi will carry out the project “Texts as Objects and Images” with us. The aim of our cooperation is an exchange about research methods and questions in working with primary sources from the early modern period. We will visit the manuscript department of the StaBi, the Museum for Islamic Art and conduct a one day workshop on our research topics.

 

Advanced MA students and PhD candidates working on subjects related to Professor Sajdi’s research are cordially invited to participate in these activities and the concluding workshop.

 

Please find attached a short description of the project and the schedule for the activities planned for Professor Sajdi’s research stay.

 

Since the number of participants is limited, kindly send a short e-mail explaining your interest in the project to colinda.lindermann@fu-berlin.de.

---

Dahlem Junior Host Program: Research Stay Dana Sajdi

invited by Colinda Lindermann and Rossella De Luca

 

Dana Sajdi is Associate Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at the Department of History, Boston College. She is an expert on the production of historical texts in the early modern period. By viewing the production of text as a social and material practice, she links historical and literary methods to give new contexts to the primarily philological topics investigated by Rossella and Colinda. The focus of the collaboration with Dana is “Texts as objects and images”, a two-week project aimed at exploring methods of “translating” and visualizing the information contained in primary texts to enhance our cultural historical understanding of Arabic-Islamic society in the Early Modern Period. The working language is English.

 

Colinda Lindermann and Rossella De Luca are PhD candidates within the Dahlem International Network Junior Research Group “Arabic Philology and Textual Practices in the Early Modern Period” directed by Prof. Dr. Islam Dayeh.

Colinda Lindermann’s research focuses on the intellectual, historical and social role early modern Arabic philologists played in the discourse on language development and language corruption, as reflected in early modern Arabic dictionaries on loanwords and solecisms.

Starting from the Arab-Islamic pre-modern scholarly tradition, Rossella De Luca focuses on Jurji Zaydan's (1861-1914) philological and linguistic contribution to modern debates on the development of the Arabic language and its role within the intellectual and cultural movement of the Arabic Nahḍa.

 

 

Programme (more information and accompanying readings upon request via e-mail)

 

Friday, 16 June 2017, from 10 AM – Activity One: The Materiality of Manuscripts and Early-Printed Texts (or: Texts as Objects)

We will visit the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin to explore one of the most important collections of early-modern Arabic texts and modern printed texts. Examining the paper, binding, marginalia, and cataloguing is telling of production, reception, and circulation of texts; of the social backgrounds of authors and scribes; and of the book industry as a whole. In following clues and fingerprints on the text, we could offer both questions and answers regarding the content of text. Thus, any scholar has to start with the inspection of the material.  

 

+ accompanying readings

 

Thursday, 22 June 2017, 4 – 7 PM – Lecture by Dana Sajdi in the “World Philologies Seminar” of Prof. Dr. Islam Dayeh

Title: “Landscaping al-Ṣāliḥiyya: Arabic Prose Topographies 16^th-18^th Centuries”

 

Friday, 23 June 2017, from 10 AM – Activity Two: Objects as Texts

We will spend a day at the Museum für Islamische Kunst to explore objects as texts. Dr. Stefan Weber, the museum director and himself an expert on Damascus, will identify a few objects from Damascus for us. We will have a conversation with him about how he reads objects and compare with how we read them. Since both texts and objects are artefacts, how can we draw a connection between the two?

 

+ accompanying readings

 

Saturday, 24 June 2017, 10 AM – 5 PM – Activity Three: Concluding Workshop

How do all these approaches affect the students’ scholarship? We will hear about the participants’ projects in a workshop aiming at connecting the different approaches utilized during Dana Sajdi’s stay and at exploring how they may affect/help their readings of their primary texts and function as strategies for contextualizing the sources.