A lecture by Romain Brethes (Sciences Politiques, Paris), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). One of the emerging questions facing scholars of the Greek novel, and imperial Greek literature more generally, is the […]
A lecture by Pierre Destrée (Université de Louvain), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). In all societies and cultures, the erotic experience is complex. It is shaped by norms, habits, emotions and manners […]
Dominic Brookshaw (Oxford University) “Zulaykha’s Redemption: From Lustful Villain to Female Icon” The guile associated with Zulaykha in the Qur’an is largely absent from her depiction in the ghazals of fourteenth-century Iran. The negativity surrounding Zulaykha’s expression (or manifestation) of female sexuality dims in the Persian ghazal where we witness the character’s salvific rehabilitation. On […]
Leili Anvar (Sorbonne, Paris) “From the Desert of Arabia to the Gardens of Herat: Wanderings of Majnûn, the Poet-Lover” In this presentation, we will follow Majnûn in his journeys from the Arabic poems to the great Persian masnavis (composed by Nezâmi, Amir Khosrow Dehlavi and Jâmi). We shall see how -with the development of sufism and […]
Prashant Keshavmurthy (McGill University) “Reading Niẓāmi Ganjavī’s Leylī u Majnūn as a Novel” Neither the Byzantines nor the Persians had any generic name for the Greek and Persian novels that were composed in the 12th century. Beholden to older (Attic Greek and Abbasid Arabic) models, the taxonomies of literary forms in both geographically adjacent literary cultures lagged […]
Justine Landau (Sorbonne) “An Epic Tribute to the Lyric Poem” Poetry does things with words. In the premodern world, this fact is perhaps nowhere acknowledged more unanimously than in the Persianate sources. Chief among the arts of language, lyric poetry is associated with “licit magic,” after the Arabic saying, since its mastery is said to […]
Julia Rubanovich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents an online lecture titled “The Tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā through the Eyes of a Jewish Poet”. This talk will examine a string of episodes from the tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā embedded into the “Book of Genesis” (Bereshit-nāma), a biblical poem composed by the fourteenth-century Judeo-Persian poet […]
Paul Losensky (Indiana University) “A Common Thread: Three Literary Careers in Early Modern Persia, England, and Spain” The emergence of the concept of the Global Renaissance has brought new attention to the political, diplomatic, economic, and artistic connections between major civilizational centers in the early modern period. For the most part, however, literature has remained […]
Shahzad Bashir (Brown University) “The Market in Poetry in the Persian World” The discussion will focus on Professor Bashir’s book The Market in Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge UP, 2021), which treats poetic utterances as objects of material value sought by those with power and resources. The book provides a sense for the texture […]
This session has been cancelled. Camilla Miglio (La Sapienza, Rome) “From Medieval Persian Literature to Modernist German Poetry” Iranian 250, “Persian Literature in English Translation: Global and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” taught by Associate Professor Domenico Ingenito (NELC), offers a survey of medieval and early modern Persian literature in English translation. The seminar fosters interdisciplinary conversations among graduate […]