Interested in presenting at Kalamazoo next year? The Great Lakes Adiban Society (GLAS) is the sponsor of two events at the upcoming International Congress for Medieval Studies, to convene on May 7–10, 2020:

  1. Seek Knowledge as Far as China: Teaching Literature from the Medieval Middle East and Beyond (A Roundtable)
  2. Love, Fear, Anger, Sorrow: Emotions and Diseases of the Soul in Islamicate Literature

To submit a paper to either of these events, go to www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions, where you can find and fill out the Participant Information Form. Please send this, along with a one-page abstract of your paper, to Cameron Cross at kchalipa@umich.edu. The due-date for all submissions is September 15, 2019. We will inform you of our decision within a week, and per ICMS guidelines, any papers not accepted will be passed on to the Medieval Institute to be considered for inclusion in the General Sessions.

Please read below for the full descriptions of these panels; for more information about our group, and to join our mailing list, visit greatlakesadiban.github.io.

1. Seek Knowledge as Far as China: Teaching Literature from the Medieval Middle East and Beyond (A Roundtable)

As medievalists grapple with the urgency of diversifying our field, we find ourselves shifting our teaching practices to accommodate new students, new texts, and new fields of critical inquiry. This roundtable will bring together scholars whose work engages with the medieval Middle East for a discussion of the pedagogical pitfalls and opportunities provided by teaching a global Middle Ages. How can medieval texts in Islamicate languages be brought into conversation with other traditions? How can these texts help teachers confront difficult but vital topics such as race, religion, and imperialism? We hope these and other questions will stimulate productive conversation.

We are interested in both focused discussions of classroom practice and broader reflections on teaching the Middle Ages beyond the boundaries of Europe. As scholars of the medieval Islamicate world, we welcome approaches grounded in inclusive pedagogy; comparative and global literatures; critical race, feminist, and postcolonial theory; post-secular critique; translation studies; canon-formation studies; and other methodologies that de-center a hegemonic “Western” perspective on the past and promote a more global and inclusive view of the premodern world. Particularly, we hope that participants will explore ways in which these varied approaches can be productively brought into play in the university classroom.

2. Love, Fear, Anger, Sorrow: Emotions and Diseases of the Soul in Islamicate Literature

The study of emotions in the pre-modern Islamicate Middle East is beginning to attract scholarly attention as an emerging field. Since, as in Medieval Europe, the word ‘emotion’ has no direct correspondence to an Islamicate concept, we invite scholars to examine how the term akhlāq (ethics, morals, character traits) can be mapped onto/as a history of emotions. While developed in medical and philosophical texts as ‘diseases of the soul’, emotions are portrayed in various ways across a wide spectrum of literary traditions of the Islamicate Middle East in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish, and thus provide ample ground for fruitful collaboration.

We especially welcome critical engagement with the concept of ‘emotion’ and the Islamicate term ‘akhlāq’ so as to determine semantic overlap and differences between the two categories. Furthermore, we encourage studies that assess the feasibility of applying theoretical approaches to emotions developed for Medieval Europe to the Islamicate world. Such studies can focus on emotion in the Qurʾān, illnesses of the soul in philosophical texts, the refinement of the self in advice literature, or on the portrayal of emotion in narrative and lyric poems. We hope that a shared vocabulary will enable future comparative projects between medievalists of various specializations.