This conference focuses on Islamic literatures, in the broadest sense, as a means of investigating the concept of “the Islamic.” By exploring Islamic literatures in disparate temporalities, geographies and linguistic spheres, what can we say about how Islam and "Islamic-ness" are articulated? How do such particularities shape the notion of an Islamic universal and how are they themselves constrained by it? And — inasmuch as literary categories of genre, language, form and context are real — how do they reflect diachronic stability and instability as well as synchronic consonance and dissonance? Through the exploration of such questions in the work of twelve experts covering a range of literary and linguistic cultures and time periods, this conference promises both to further our understanding of literary and cultural production in the Islamic world and to center Islamic cultures as productive contexts for intellectual inquiry on important topics of broader scholarly interest.

CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS

Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, University of Pennsylvania
Sarah R. Bin Tyeer, Columbia University
James Caron, SOAS
Jamal J. Elias, University of Pennsylvania
Domenico Arturo Ingenito, UCLA
Ali Karjoo-Ravary, Bucknell University
Matthew L. Keegan, Barnard College
Fatemeh Keshavarz, University of Maryland
Pasha M. Khan, McGill University
Afsar Mohammad, University of Pennsylvania
Ahoo Najafian, Macalester College
Austin O'Malley, University of Arizona
Tony K. Stewart, Vanderbilt University