Worlds of Knowledge in Women’s Travel Writing

James Uden | 21 September 2021

Islam and the Arabs in Spanish Scholarship

Spanish Arabism was a touchstone of the major intellectual and political issues facing Spain as it emerged from its imperial past into its current form as a modern nation-state. James T. Monroe’s survey of four centuries of Spanish scholarship on the cultural history of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) establishes Spanish scholars on the forefront of European scholars confronting the Orientalism and colonialism at the heart of their national projects. This reissue… Read more

Onomastic Reforms

In the mid-1920s, the Iranian state legislated a wide-ranging reform of the citizenry’s naming practices. Honorary titles and honorifics were abolished, family names were made obligatory, and an office for registering names and citizens’ life events (birth, marriage, divorce, and death) was established. The main motivation for this onomastic reform was conscription, which necessitated knowledge of young men’s ages, identities, and whereabouts. The introduction of conscription was itself part of… Read more

Methodists and Muslims

Richard W. Bulliet is an innovative historian of the Islamic world. His contributions have changed the way scholars think about the history of medieval city life, animal domestication, wheeled transport, religious conversion, Islamic institutions, and relations between Islam and Christianity. His fifty-year career at Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia coincided with the rise of Middle East Studies as an American academic enterprise and with his Columbia colleague Edward Said’s book Orientalism,… Read more

Cyrus the Great

The edited volume Cyrus the Great: Life and Lore re-contextualizes Cyrus’s foundational act and epoch in light of recent scholarship, while examining his later reception in antiquity and beyond. Among the many themes addressed in the volume are: the complex dossier of Elamo-Persian acculturation; the Mesopotamian antecedents of Cyrus’s edict and religious policy; Cyrus’s Baupolitik at Pasargadae, and the idiosyncratic genesis of Persian imperial art; the Babylonian exile, the Bible, and the First Return;… Read more

The Arts of Iran in Istanbul and Anatolia

Many spectacular examples of Persianate art survive to the present day, safeguarded in Istanbul and beyond—celebrating the glory of the Persian Empire (and, later, the Ottoman Empire). These include illustrated books, featuring exquisitely painted miniatures artfully embedded in the texts of literary masterpieces, as well as tile decorations in medieval Anatolian architecture. Because of their beauty, many Persianate books were deliberately disassembled, their illustrations re-used in newer books or possessed… Read more

The Study of al-Andalus

The Study of al-Andalus is a collection of essays by students and colleagues of James T. Monroe, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Arabic at the University of California, Berkeley, and the premier scholar of Andalusi (Hispano-Arabic) literature in the United States. The introduction by the editors explains the impact Monroe’s scholarship has had on the fields of Arabic, Spanish, and comparative literatures. The first essay in the collection explains the… Read more

Illusion and Disillusionment

Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age seeks to understand, expand, and challenge the boundaries of the modern travelogue across several literary traditions. Through an engaging cast of characters—China-bound missionaries, an Indo-Persian diplomat, a Turkish exile in India, a French schoolteacher touring America, Arab students in Moscow, a Japanese woman writer in Europe—this volume extends the study of travel writing beyond the frameworks of colonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism, focusing… Read more

Singing Moses’s Song

How does performing affect those who perform? Starting from observation of the intergenerational tradition of performing the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy 32.1–43), Keith Stone explores ways in which the Song contributes to Deuteronomy’s educational program through the dynamics of reenactment that operate in traditions of performance. Performers of the Song are transformed as they reenact not only characters within the Song but also those who came before them in the history of… Read more

Erin and Iran

In Erin and Iran, ten essays by North American and European scholars discuss parallel themes in and interactions between Irish and Iranian cultures. In the first section three essays explore common elements in pre-Christian Irish and pre-Islamic Iranian mythologies, common elements that have often been pointed out by scholars of Indo-European mythology but rarely examined in detail. In the following section four essays address literary subjects, ranging from medieval romances such… Read more