We are excited to announce that the Great Lakes Adiban Society (GLAS) Ninth Annual Workshop will be held Friday–Sunday, October 10–12, 2025, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.

GLAS provides a regional forum for scholars of Islamicate adab to meet and share their work. We leave our parameters of language and genre intentionally open to invite as wide a collaboration as can be useful. As a group we are generally interested in the literary production of the broad complex of premodern Islamicate societies across the Eastern Hemisphere grounded in similar literary conventions. Thus, our scope focuses on past texts and traditions from the languages of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, as well as many others including Armenian, Dravidian languages, Kurdish, Georgian, Hebrew and Jewish languages, as well as Slavic languages.

This year, GLAS and the Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Program will host a special guest. On Friday, October 10, 2025, at 16:00, Professor Jamal Elias will kick off our workshop by discussing his forthcoming book, After Rumi: The Mevlevis and Their World (Harvard Univ. Press, 2025). This talk will be open to the public and will be followed by a reception.

For the workshop on Saturday and Sunday, October 11 and 12, 2025, GLAS welcomes works in progress that would benefit from extensive discussion and feedback, especially for graduate students and early career scholars. Please submit a proposal by filling out this google form by August 1, 2025. We expect to notify presenters by August 15.

For graduate students: we have a limited amount of funding for travel and lodging (to request funding, see the google form).

For questions and inquiries, please write Jonathan.Brack@northwestern.edu.