POSTPONED UNTIL 2022

Hosted and Sponsored by Princeton University Library

Speakers

Moya Carey (PhD SOAS, University of London, 2001) is the Curator of Islamic Collections at the Chester Beatty in Dublin. Her research primarily addresses the visual culture of Iran (particularly manuscripts, metalwork and carpets) and the history of collecting in the Middle Eastern region. She is currently working on a joint project with Dr. Mercedes Volait about architectural salvage in late nineteenth-century Cairo. Her studies include Persian Art: Collecting the Arts of Iran for the V&A (2017), and “Appropriating Damascus Rooms: Vincent Robinson, Caspar Purdon Clarke and Commercial Strategy in Victorian London,” in À l’orientale – Collecting, Displaying and Appropriating Islamic Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, ed. F. Giese, A. Varela Braga and M. Volait (2020).

Garrett Davidson is an assistant professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the College of Charleston. He primarily works on medieval Islamic intellectual history and manuscript cultures. He is the author of Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission Across a Thousand Years (2020).

Yuval Evri is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Kings College London. His research focuses on the cultural history of Palestine/Land of Israel at the turn of the 20th century focusing on Sephardi/Arab-Jewish culture and thought. His recent book, titled The Return to Al-Andalus: Disputes Over Sephardic Culture and Identity Between Arabic and Hebrew, was published by Magnes press in 2020.

Celeste Gianni currently works as Cataloger of Arabic Manuscripts at HMML (Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John’s University, Minnesota). Prior to joining HMML, she held a research position at the University of Oxford as Research Associate in Arabic Manuscripts, focusing on the collection of Paul Sbath at the Vatican Library. Gianni earned her PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, with a thesis entitled, “Poetics of the Catalogue: Library Catalogues in the Arab Provinces during the Late Ottoman Period.”

Allyson Gonzalez (PhD Brandeis University) is a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as an upcoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies in Berlin-Brandenburg. Having taught at Yale University and Florida State, Gonzalez has served as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Israel (2019–20) and was one of two recipients of the New Voices in Jewish Studies from Fordham and Columbia University (2018–19). A former Pulitzer Prize finalist as the lead writer of her newspaper team, Gonzalez is completing a book-length project that examines public Jewishness in modern Spain.

Stephen Greenberg, MSLS, PhD, AHIP is a rare book librarian, historian, teacher, writer, and photographer. For the last twenty-nine years, he has worked in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine, part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, where he currently serves as head of the Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Section. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland (College Park) and the Catholic University of America.

Ofir Haim is a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Geniza Lab. His current project explores the social order of pre-Mongol eastern Iran through the lens of its Jewish minority based on the so-called “Afghan Geniza.” He was one of the editors of Efraim Wust’s Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish Manuscripts of the Yahudah Collection of the National Library of Israel, volume II (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

Konrad Hirschler is Professor of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Over the last years, he has primarily worked on the history of reading, of the book and of libraries in the Syrian lands with an emphasis on social contexts and material cultures. His main current project is concerned with a private book collection from fourteenth-century Jerusalem.

Evyn Kropf is a librarian and curator at the University of Michigan Library where she partners with other colleagues to ensure that collections of manuscripts and other materials are preserved and accessible for scholarship, appreciation and inspiration long into the future. As a specialist of Islamic codicology and Arabic manuscript culture, her particular interests include writing material (especially paper), structural repairs, reading and collecting practices of the Ottoman era as well as the significance of pictograms and other visual content for Sufi knowledge transmission.

Boris Liebrenz is a senior research fellow at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (Saxon Academy of the Sciences and Humanities, Leipzig). His main research focuses on the history of manuscripts, libraries, and reading in the Islamic world, the topic of his second book, Die Rifāʿīya aus Damaskus (Leiden 2016), which won the Annemarie Schimmel Forschungspreis in 2017.

Stefan Litt is Curator of General Humanities at the National Library of Israel. His current research focuses on the Western incunables at the NLI.

Rana Mikati is an assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at the College of Charleston. Her research interests include the cultural and intellectual history of the eastern Mediterranean in the early medieval period, the history of early Islamic frontiers, warfare, and Islamic archaeology.

Ricardo Muñoz Solla (PhD. in Hebrew Philology) is Associate Professor at Salamanca University in the Department of Jewish and Aramaic Studies. Currently he is carrying out a research about the history and development of Jewish Studies in XXth century Spain. He combines research on medieval Spanish Jewry and converso identities with contemporary approaches to Jewish Hispanism. Among his latest publications can be highlighted: “Olga Bauer y Zenobia Camprubí: Historia de una amistad” Revista de Literatura, CSIC (2020) and “El redescubrimiento de Maimónides en la primera mitad del siglo XX”, Et amicorum. Estudios en honor a Carlos Carrete Parrondo, Salamanca 2019. He is also coeditor in-chief of the Series The Iberian Religious World (Brill Publishers).

William Noel is the John T. Maltsberger III ’55 Associate University Librarian for Special Collections in Princeton University Library. He has led numerous projects to digitize and data-mine pre-modern manuscripts, and has experience in directing complicated, large digital humanities projects such as the imaging, conservation, and transcription of the Archimedes Palimpsest. He likes to talk: he teaches for Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, he delivered the Sandars Lectures in Bibliography in 2019, and he often advocates for open data, as he does in this TED talk.

Dagmar Riedel is a Middle East historian. Her research draws on the material evidence of manuscripts and printed books in Arabic script to explore the transmission of knowledge inside and outside Muslim communities.  She writes a research blog about Islamic Books: https://researchblogs.cul.columbia.edu/islamicbooks.

Marina Rustow is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University, and director of the Princeton Geniza Lab and of the Program in Near Eastern Studies. Her most recent book is The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (2020).

Stefan Schorch is Professor of Hebrew Bible and Hebrew language at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle–Wittenberg. Among his current major projects are “A critical editio maior of the Samaritan Pentateuch” (5 volumes, of which two have appeared) and an edition, together with translation and commentary, of the Samaritan Arabic “Kitāb al-Ḫilāf” (jointly with Daniel Boušek and Gregor Schwarb), a fourteenth-century treatise about theological and halakhic differences between Samaritans and Jews.

Ahmed El Shamsy is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. His recent book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, examines the transition of classical Islamic literature from manuscript to print.

Ali Gibran Siddiqui is the Leon B. Poullada Postdoctoral Research Associate in Central Asian Studies at the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. As a historian of Islamic Central Asia, he is interested in the economic, political, and social lives of Naqshbandi Sufis in the Timurid and Mughal Empires. His current projects include articles on the Juybari Naqshbandi presence in Mughal India and the role of miraculous dreams and spiritual monopolies in jade production in sixteenth-century Kashgar.

Samuel Thrope is the Curator of the Islam and Middle East Collection at the National Library of Israel. His most recent book, co-translated with Domenico Agostini, is The Bundahišn: The Zoroastrian Book of Creation (Oxford, 2021).

Raquel Ukeles is Head of Collections at the National Library of Israel and served as Curator of the Islam and Middle East collection from 2010 to 2021. She received a BA from Princeton (1993) and an MA and PhD from Harvard (2006) in comparative Islamic and Jewish studies. Her publications span comparative Jewish and Islamic traditions and the history of Islamic manuscripts and Islamic law. She most recently co-edited the first and second volumes of Ephraim Wust’s Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Manuscripts of the Yahuda Collection of the National Library of Israel (2016;2020).

Yusuf al-Uzbeki was born in Jerusalem in 1977, holds an MA in History of Islamic Sciences from Al-Quds University – Abu Dis (2009), and is a doctoral student at Al-Zaytuna University in Tunis. He has published eleven books and editions of manuscripts, including an edition of Masʾalat ḥudūth al-ʿālam by Ibn Taymiyyah (2012).

Torsten Wollina studied at Jena University and received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2012. His research focuses on manuscript collections, provenance, and cataloguing. He has been a research associate at the Orient-Institut Beirut and a Marie-Curie Cofund Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin. He is currently working as a researcher at the Staatsbibliothek Berlin on the project “Orient-Digital”.

Organizing committee   

• Garrett Davidson
• William Noel 
• Marina Rustow 
• Emma Sarconi 
• Deborah Schlein
• Samuel Thrope
• Raquel Ukeles 
• Eric White
• Torsten Wollina 

Co-sponsors

• The College of Charleston Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program
• Princeton University’s Center for Collaborative History, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Institute for International and Regional Studies, Manuscript Rare Book and Archive Studies Initiative, Program in Judaic Studies, Program in Near Eastern Studies, and Public Lectures.