Student Profile: Zeinab Azarbadegan

Zeinab Azarbadegan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History, in the International and Global History (IGH) track. Her research focuses on inter-imperial relations and impact of new concepts and technologies in the nineteenth century Middle East and South Asia. Her dissertation, entitled “Bloodless Battles: Contested Sovereignty and Citizenship in Ottoman Iraq, 1831-1909,” examines the conflicting and evolving interests in Ottoman Iraq analyzing Ottoman, Qajar -in modern Iran-, and British interests, policies, and personnel, that sought to assert sovereignty over both the space and the population. Zeinab’s research has been supported by the GSAS International Travel Fellowship and Sakıp Sabancı Summer Fellowship Award.

Zeinab was recently interviewed by the Global Studies Blog at Columbia University on her research and interests in Persian lithographs, and in the Nafisi book collection at the Columbia University Libraries: Persian Lithographs: Jām-i Jam: “The World Revealing Goblet”, An interview with Zeinab Azarbadegan

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The Adab Colloquium: Workshop with Mana Kia and Sunil Sharma

The Imprint of the Era in the Adab of the Times: Circulation and the Persianate at Empire’s End

Wednesday, September 23, 2020. 4:00-6:00 pm

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In this Adab Colloquium, Dr. Mana Kia will discuss her paper examining the relation between material circulation of texts, commemorations of collectives, and transregional social imaginaries at the end of Persianate empires between Iran and India. Beginning with imperial apogee at the end of the seventeenth century, her paper traces imprints of subsequent social and political fragmentation on the form (adab) of tazkirah writing and transregional connections.

This event will take place online over Zoom. To RSVP and receive the link to join and a copy of the pre-circulated paper please contact Katherine von Ofenheim at kev2122@columbia.edu.

The Adab Colloquium in Columbia is a platform for scholars whose work engages with the range of adab practices of reading, writing, and performance from the 6th century down to the 19th century. The colloquium brings together faculty and graduate students from Columbia and other universities in the region for intensive discussions of new research by leading specialists invited from the US and abroad.

Matthew L. Keegan: The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past

Faculty Profile

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history and adab (usually translated as "literature" or "belles-lettres"). In particular, he writes about the commentaries on al-Hariri's Maqamat, a 12th-century collection of stories about an eloquent trickster.

Over the course of July 2020, he is moderating a series of online workshops hosted by the Columbia Global Center in Amman about Kalila wa-Dimna, a collection of stories about fictive humans and talking animals. Kalila wa-Dimna is the subject of the AnonymClassic ERC-sponsored project where Professor Keegan completed a postdoctoral fellowship in 2019. The following post discusses the very different manuscript traditions of Kalila wa-Dimna and al-Hariri's Maqamat.

The Stakes of Editing the Unruly Past

Arabic manuscripts are documents of social and intellectual history. The scribes who copied them, the readers who perused them, and the scholars who scribbled notes in their margins were all involved in shaping the way that manuscripts came to be read by their later readers. When texts from before the dawn of Arabic print culture in the 19th century came to be edited and put in print, editors often erased these testaments to the social lives of manuscripts.

Consider, for example, the case of al-Hariri's Maqamat, which was first read aloud to an audience of scholars in Baghdad in the year 1111 AD. Most copies of the Maqamat do not contain the brilliant illustrations that have become popular on book covers and event posters. Most copies contain the scribbles of later readers who glossed and annotated the text in the course of their reading and study.

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