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 Islamicness 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, this conference hopes both to further our understanding of cultural and literary production in the Islamic world and to center Islam and Islamic data as a productive context for intellectual inquiry on important topics of broader scholarly interest.

Sarah bin Tyeer  (Columbia)

Huda Fakhreddine  (Penn)

Fatemeh Keshavarz  (University of Maryland)

Pasha M. Khan  (McGill)

Oscar Aguirre Mandujano  (Penn)

Afsar Muhammad  (Penn)

Ahoo Najafian  (Carleton College)

Austin O’Malley  (University of Texas)

Bilal Orfali  (American University Beirut)

Fatemeh Shams  (Penn)

Tony Stewart  (Vanderbilt)

Sponsored by the Penn Forum for Global Islamic Studies, the South Asia Center, the Middle East Center, the Departments of South Asia Studies, Religious Studies, and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Wolf Humanities Center.