Missed LAL’s “A Corpus, Not a Canon” event in Oxford last month? You can now get the inside scoop thanks to our Arabic Literature (in English) correspondent. Preview some of the highlights in “Consorts of the Caliphs”: History Through the Writings of 39 Women, which quotes LAL Editors Philip Kennedy, Shawkat Toorawa and Julia Bray, as well as NYU Professor Richard Sieburth, as they discuss both the just-published Consorts of the Caliphs and the series at large as “consciously non-canonical and collaborative” efforts; and hear what Humphrey Davies and Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s numerous fan club have to say about their intricate wordwork in What Does It Matter If ‘Leg Over Leg’ Is the ‘First Arabic Novel’?.
If you want to follow the entire workshop in full, you can also tune in to the following podcasts for a live recording of the day’s panels:
“Welcome Remarks & Remembering the Corpus”—Session 1, Session 2, Session 3
“Editing the Corpus”—Session 4
“Translating the Corpus”—Session 5
“Reading the Corpus”—Session 6
Other esteemed speakers in attendance included: Roger Allen, editor and translator of What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us, or, A Period of Time by Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī; Sean Anthony, editor and translator of The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muhammad by Maʿmar ibn Rāshid; Ros Ballaster, Professor of English at Mansfield College, University of Oxford; Marilyn Booth, Professor of the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford and Fellow at Magdalen College; Michael Cooperson, editor and translator of Virtues of the Imām Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal by Ibn al-Jawzī; Robyn Creswell, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University and poetry editor of The Paris Review; Ferial Ghazoul, Chair and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Cairo; Beatrice Gruendler, editor and translator of forthcoming The Life and Times of Abū Tammām by Abū Bakr al-Ṣūlī; Dominique Jullien, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Joseph E. Lowry, editor and translator of The Epistle on Legal Theory: A Translation of al-Shāfiʿī’s Risālah by Muḥammad ibn Idris al-Shāfiʿī; James Montgomery, LAL Executive Editor and editor-translator of Two Arabic Travel Books with Tim Mackintosh-Smith; Mohamed-Salah Omri, Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Oxford; Matthew Reynolds, Professor of English and Comparative Criticism at the University of Oxford; Chip Rossetti, LAL Managing Editor; Devin Stewart, editor and translator of Disagreements of the Jurists: A Manual of Islamic Legal Theory by Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān; Geert Jan van Gelder, editor and translator of Classical Arabic Literature and The Epistle of Forgiveness with Gregor Schoeler; as well as LAL International Advisory Board members Robert Irwin, Wen-chin Ouyang, and Dame Marina Warner, Fellow at All Souls College and co-editor of Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights.
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