The Great Lakes Adiban Society (GLAS) invites submissions for its fourth annual workshop, scheduled to take place online on September 5–6, 2020, from 9:00–1:30 EDT (with breaks). The primary purpose of this gathering is to share work in progress for critique and feedback, rather than to present work that is already finalized or published. Graduate students and first-time participants are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants will have the option of presenting their projects as either a ‘lightning talk’ of 5 minutes (with 15 minutes for discussion), or as an in-depth presentation of 20 minutes (with 30 minutes for discussion). In either case, we encourage you to privilege the conceptual issues you wish to discuss, and to be provocative with respect to your topics, discipline, and methodology. This could include projects that use non-traditional sources, employ digital humanities approaches, or foreground collaborative practices in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on research into Islamicate literatures. We are expressly mindful of the fact that our time together is most valuable when it involves exchange and argumentation; for that reason, we also ask that participants commit to attending the full duration of the workshop.

If interested, please fill out our online application by August 7, 2020. Please be aware that we have a limited number of slots available, and may not be able to accept every application. If this happens, however, you are still welcome to participate in the workshop as an audience member. A link to register as an audience member will be circulated in mid-August, along with the finalized schedule.

About us: GLAS aims to provide a regional forum for scholars of Islamicate adab, particularly of the medieval and early modern periods, primarily based in the Great Lakes region of North America, to meet and share their work. We leave our parameters of language and genre intentionally open in order to invite as wide a collaboration as can be useful, but as a group we are generally interested in the literary production of the broad complex of premodern Muslim societies across the Eastern Hemisphere. This naturally includes the major Islamicate languages of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as many others (Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.) that participate in similar literary conventions. We consider this comparative angle an essential part of our scholarly work. For more about GLAS and the work we have done in the past, please visit https://greatlakesadiban.github.io/; if you have any questions, you can email Cameron Cross at kchalipa [ at ] umich [ dot ] edu.