GLAS 10th Annual Workshop Program

The Great Lakes Adiban Society is holding its 10th Annual Workshop on October 3–4, 2026 at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI. Meeting location is 02101 Dunbar Hall.


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Saturday, October 3

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am. The Ethics and Symbols of Love and Family

  • Cameron Cross / Towards a Comparative Analysis of Chivalry
  • Eva Kuras / Cross-Cultural Connections of Courtly Love and Materiality in the Global Medieval Romance
  • Glenn Ellis / The Adab of Sex and Marriage in Majlisī’s Ḥilyat al-Mutaqqīn (The Adornment of the Pious)

Short Break

11:30 am. Persians and Others in Persian Epics

  • Kaveh Hemmat / China in Amir Khosrow’s Alexander Epic, Tusi’s Theory of Invention, and the Reception History of Nezami’s Alexander Epic
  • Thomas Parsa / Creating a Cosmopolitan Epic: The Garshasp-nama, Recentering a Peripheral Tradition and Expansive Persianate Identity

Catered Lunch

2:30 pm. Textual Traditions of the Islamicate East Across Linguistic Boundaries

  • Kellen Parker Van Dam / Improving Arabic-script Text Recognition Accuracy With Synthetic Training Data
  • Jens Inden / A Close Reading Textual Comparison: Kalīla wa-Dimna and al-Ḥikma al-Khālida

Dinner at Roca’s (6:30 pm)

Sunday, October 4

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am. Poetry in Dialogue with Other Disciplines in the First Centuries A.H.

  • Jennifer Tobkin / What Can Muḥammad b. Dāwūd’s “Man of Our Times” Poems Tell Us About Abbasid Historiography?
  • Ammar Farra / Craftsmanship, Revelation, and Transmission in Early Arabic Literature
  • Jeson Ng / Like Two Horses in a Race: Persian and Turkic in Competition with Arabic

Catered Lunch: Workshop wrap-up, next year planning

Funding for this workshop was generously provided by the WMU Department of History, the Department of World Languages and Culture, and the Medieval Institute.