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Nature Made Absent? Environmental History and Arabic Manuscript Studies

This is the presentation I gave recently at the 2019 conference of the European Society of Environmental History in Tallinn, Estonia (21-24 August). The theme was “Boundaries in/of Environmental History” and the paper was given in James L. Smith’s panel:

What follows is my presentation with images as far as I can use them.

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New Publication on the transmission of Ibn Tulun manuscripts

The Journal of Islamic Manuscripts has just published its newest iteration, a special issue on manuscript notes. The editor Boris Liebrenz is well-known as an authority on this “marginal” topic. My contribution looks in particular at four manuscripts today held at the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, and traces their historical trajectories from Ibn Ṭūlūn’s original book endowment until their acquisition by Chester Beatty. Continue reading “New Publication on the transmission of Ibn Tulun manuscripts”

New Publication on Narratology in Arabic Historiography

Finally, Mamluk Studies 15: “Mamluk Historiography Revisited – Narratological Perspectives” is out. The edited volume brings together twelve articles on perspectives on specific works or larger clusters of works. My own contribution, “The Changing Legacy of a Sufi Shaykh: Narrative Constructions in Diaries, Chronicles, and Biographies (15th–17th Centuries)”, investigates the development of how knowledge on one specific person was shaped and adapted with growing temporal distance. Continue reading “New Publication on Narratology in Arabic Historiography”

Recent Publications: Dyntran Blog and Ottoman Studies 2 (Bonn University Press)

In the course of the last month, two publications of mine came out. The first is my contribution to the blog of the research cluster “Dynamics of Transmission” (DYNTRAN), in which I trace the development of a family network in 15th-/16th-century Damascus and try to show the differences between ‘family’ and those ‘dynasties’ that emerge in the biographical dictionaries of the time.

Dyntran title page
Fig. 1: Dyntran logo

Continue reading “Recent Publications: Dyntran Blog and Ottoman Studies 2 (Bonn University Press)”