Upcoming Events: A ‘History of the Arabic Book’ Translating Octavia Butler, More

Events coming up in the next week include a talk about translating Octavia Butler’s Kindred, “The History of the Arabic Book: A New Chapter;” “Hazine: A Guide to Researching the Middle East and Beyond;” and “Stories We Continue to Tell: The Many Returns of the Thousand and One Nights“:

February 1, Octavia Butler’s KINDRED in Translation: Examining Oppression via Genre-Writing:

In this talk, translator Mona Kareem will be in conversation with Justin Mann.

February 3, The History of the Arabic Book:

This jointly delivered lecture will present the KITAB project – a collaboration between historians and computer scientists that addresses these major questions. We have assembled a corpus of 1.7 billion words of Arabic texts, and are seeking specifically to understand transmission practices (ca. 700-1500), with a special focus on how authors recycled earlier works and how they cited their predecessors. Through this lecture, we hope to describe the frontiers of knowledge, the challenges and promises of our data, and what listeners themselves might now do with it.

Presenters will be Mathew Barber, Lorenz Nigst, Sarah Bowen Savant, and Peter Verkinderen.

February 4, Hazine: A Guide to Researching the Middle East and Beyond:

While Hazine has already been highlighting the many digital resources available, Hazine has continued to do so with the intention of supporting research during the pandemic. In our roundtable presentation, we will discuss how we work to build community, support equitable access to research materials, and platform underrepresented voices in academia and library and information science (LIS). We will share the ethics that guide our work, particularly in a context where there are often extraction approaches to cultural heritage in the Middle East. We will also discuss the infrastructure and work that makes this project sustainable.

Panelists will be Shabbir Agha Abbas, Graduate Student, Columbia University; Marwa Gadallah, Graphic Designer; Heather Hughes, Co-editor, Hazine; Middle Eastern Studies Librarian at Penn University; N.A. Mansour, Co-editor, Hazine; PhD Candidate, Princeton University.

February 7, Stories We Continue to Tell: The Many Returns of the Thousand and One Nights:

The Thousand and One Nights has been fueling the imagination and craft of storytellers since the 18th century. This conversation between two winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award traces the returns and afterlives of the Nights until today, and discusses why these tales continue to inspire and affect the stories of writers from all over the globe.

Speakers are: Richard van Leeuwen, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies, University of Amsterdam; Philip Kennedy, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Comparative Literature, NYUAD; and Maya Kesrouany, Assistant Professor of Literature and Arab Crossroads Studies, NYUAD.

If you have virtual events you’d like us to announce, please email info@arablit.org.