Paul Babinski (Princeton University)
Paul Babinski is a PhD candidate studying the history of orientalist literature. His dissertation, “World Literature in Practice: The Orientalist Manuscript, 1600-1800,” works from the manuscripts, notebooks, marginalia, and letters of European orientalists to follow the transformation of orientalist practices from the mid-seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, with a particular focus on how Ottoman institutions, scholars, and scholarship facilitated and informed the work of early modern German, Dutch, and French orientalists. Subjects addressed in the dissertation include the efforts of Georg Gentius, Adam Olearius, André du Ryer, and others to translate Saʿdī’s Golestān, inscriptions found in manuscripts acquired as Türkenbeute, European readers of Sūdī Bosnevī’s commentaries, the manuscript collections of Christian Raue and Theodor Peträus, Wojciech Bobowski’s manuscripts, the copying practices of Johann Jacob Reiske and his students, Silvestre de Sacy’s lectures, and the exercises and translations of students at the École des jeunes de langues (Istanbul and Paris) and the Orientalische Akademie (Vienna). His other interests include Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, alba amicorum, the history of philology, book history, reading practices, prints, drawings, historia literaria, late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish literature, Islamic art, and the history of pedagogy. Before coming to Princeton in 2013 he studied at the University of Colorado - Boulder. |
Sam Bootle (University of Durham)
Dr Sam Bootle has been Assistant Professor of French Studies at Durham University since 2014. His first monograph, entitled Laforgue, Philosophy, and Ideas of Otherness, was published by Legenda in 2018; it deals with the late nineteenth-century French poet Jules Laforgue and his reception of German philosophy, a reception that was profoundly influenced by contemporary discourses that cast Germany as 'other' to France. Among these discourses was one that Orientalised Germany due to some German philosophers' interest in Eastern thought, especially Buddhism. Sam's new project exploresencounters with Buddhism in nineteenth-century French culture more broadly, arguing that such encounters represent a paradigm shift in how Europe conceived of 'otherness'. |
Alex Bubb (Roehampton University)
Alex works on literature of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, and has a particular interest in how British culture was changed and enriched by the European encounter with India. Presently he is completing a book on the consumption by Victorian readers of classical literature from Asia, which has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well known. But this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. He is investigating the numerous, now mostly-forgotten popular translations that were created to make these texts accessible to the Victorian and Edwardian general readership, and as part of my research, he has been collecting copies of such translations containing pencil notes left by their former owners. He now has about sixty of these. |
Julia Hartley (University of Warwick)
Julia is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick, where she is writing a book on the reception of Iranian culture, history, and literature in nineteenth-century France. Her work spans from Romanticism to the turn-of-the-century and comprises four genres: lyric poetry; history and historical fiction; travel-writing; and the performing arts. In doing so, the book brings a new approach to the analysis of nineteenth-century French Orientalism: one that focuses on an individual civilisation rather than a generic Orient, looks beyond France’s colonial empire, and considers the impact of genre. This results in a more nuanced picture, in which the dehumanising ‘othering’ famously described by Edward Said in Orientalism exists alongside examples of admiration, familiarisation, and identification. Nineteenth-century French writers tested the Occident/Orient dichotomy, emphasising it or eroding it based on the narrative that they sought to promote. Julia’s publications related to this project are: ‘Beyond Orientalism: When Desbordes-Valmore carried Sa’di’s roses to France’, Iranian Studies (2019) and ‘Exoticism and Similarity in Jean Lahor’s Quatrains d’Al-Ghazali (1896)’, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 14 (2019). She is also writing a chapter on Achaemenid Iran in French archeology and historical fiction as part of an edited volume entitled French Decadence in a Global Context: Colonialism and Exoticism. |
Maddalena Italia (UCL)
Maddalena is a Research Fellow at UCL, where she works on the Leverhulme-funded project “Comparative Classics: Greece, Rome, India”. She is currently completing a monograph on the modern reception of Sanskrit erotic poetry, which covers a kaleidoscope of sources ranging from 19th-century Latin translations-cum-commentaries to early 20th-century risqué editions in English, Italian and French. One of the themes that the book explores is the Western philologists’ problematic comparison/assimilation of Sanskrit poetry to the Graeco-Roman classics. To the Sanskrit-Graeco-Roman intertextual field were often added the literatures of other ‘Eastern/Oriental’ or ‘Asian’ peoples, the sources of ‘exotic erotic’ imagery and tropes that could be compared with the Sanskrit materials. These deeply intertextual comparative exercises often informed translation practices, so that many modern versions of Sanskrit erotic poems bear traces of creative ‘contamination’ with other (Classical or Oriental) literary cultures. At the far end of the spectrum of cross-cultural contamination stand ‘faux Sanskrit’ erotic verses that – just like contemporary translations of the Arabian Nights – were more Western in origin than they purported to be. Edward Powys Mathers (1892–1939) – alias Torquemada, recently a Tik Tok sensation as the author of the murder mystery puzzle Cain’s Jawbone – is one of the many Orientalist translators that populate Maddalena’s book. His 'translation' of the erotic poem Caurapañcāśikā as “Black Marigolds” is discussed in Maddalena's paper “Eastern Poetry by Western Poets” (Comparative Critical Studies 17 (2), 2020). |
Sebastian Lecourt (University of Houston)
Sebastian Lecourt received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston. His research focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularization, colonialism, and comparativism – often centering upon the emerging nineteenth-century academic study of religion. His first book, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018), considers a group of liberal intellectuals who debated whether religion was a matter of individual belief or of cultural identity, and shows how this distinction became central to liberal understandings of aesthetic agency. Sebastian is working on a second book project entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783-1927, which considers the key role that literary form played in constructing the nineteenth-century canon of “world religions.” His essays have appeared in PMLA, Representations, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and other journals. |
Sarga Moussa (CNRS, Paris)
Sarga Moussa studied literature at the University of Geneva and has worked in France for the past 25 years. He is a research director at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and the co-director of the l’UMR THALIM (CNRS-Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-ENS) in Paris. Within this laboratory that brings together literary historians and art historians, he co-leads the ‘Intercultural dynamics’ stream. Sarga is a specialist in literary Orientalism and travel writing on the Orient, in particular from the 19thand 20th centuries, and works more widely on the representation of cultural otherness in French literature. This includes in particular the figure of the nomad, the representation of slavery, the concept of cosmopolitanism, the discourse on race and postcolonial studies. One of his collaborative projects has focused on literary and cultural representations of the Suez canal. This led to an international conference at the University of Cairo in November 2018, which was organised with Randa Sabry and which resulted in a special issue of the journal Sociétés et Représentations (n° 48, octobre 2019). The issue argued against the hegemonic discourse by focusing on a plurality of memories of the darker face of an enterprise celebrated in 1869 as a ‘marriage between the Orient and the Occident’, an enterprise conducted at the cost of great pain and a loss of sovereignty for Egypt. An anthology of texts on the imaginary of the Suez canal, in both French and Egyptian literature, is under preparation. His publications include : Le Mythe bédouin chez les voyageurs aux xviiie et xixe siècles, Paris, Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, « Imago Mundi », 2016 ; a special issue on « Bouvier, intermédiaire capital », in the online journal Viatica, octobre 2017 ; « Edward Said au Victoria College du Caire, ou l’apprentissage de la complexité », dans Makram Abbès et Laurent Dartigues (dir.), Orientalismes / Occidentalismes. À propos de l’œuvre d’Edward Said, Paris, Hermann, 2018, p. 353-366 ; co-edited with Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, Dialogues interculturels à l’époque coloniale et postcoloniale. Représentations littéraires et culturelles. Orient, Maghreb et Afrique occidentale (de 1830 à nos jours), Paris, Kimé, 2019. |
Angus Nicholls (Queen Mary, University of London)
Angus Nicholls Is Professor of Comparative Literature and German and current Chair of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His current book project, entitled Literature and the Science of Comparison, examines the emergence of comparative literature as an academic discipline during the nineteenth century. Some of this work involves examining orientalist texts on Western and non-Western comparison, including Goethe’s Notes to the West-Eastern Divan and Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East project. In 2018, Nicholls co-edited, together with John Davis, a volume on Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought (London: Routledge). His earlier monographs include Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic (2006) and Myth and the Human Sciences (2015). |
Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn
Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn is a researcher at the CNRS in Paris, in the research center UMR 8547 Pays germaniques: transferts culturels. She specializes in the transnational history of Oriental studies from the 18th to the 20th century, which she studies by combining the history of knowledge and concepts, the history of scholarly institutions, and political history. Her current book project traces the history of the International Congress of Orientalists from its founding in 1873 to its final session under that name in 1973. Through the 100 years of existence of this institution she seeks to analyze the shifting contours of the notion of Orientalism in the scholarly field, as well as the profound changes in the organization of disciplines – up to the rise of area studies in the second half of the 20th century. Together with Kevin Ku-Ming Chang (Academia Sinica, Taipei) she is also running a project on “Philology and interculturality” which investigates how philological traditions are constantly (re)shaped by cultural transfers. Her publications include: Archives of origins. Sanskrit, philology and anthropology in 19th century Germany (Harrassowitz 2013), Théories intercontinentales. Voyages du comparatisme postcolonial (Demopolis, 2014), Afrikanische Deutschland-Studien und Deutsche Afrikanistik, ein Spiegelbild (Königshausen&Neumann, 2015), La part étrangère des musées (Revue germanique internationale 21/2015). |
Mishka Sinha (St John's, University of Oxford)
I am a Research Associate at St. John’s College and am co-directing the project on St. John’s and the Colonial Past with Professor William Whyte. I am a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern period with wide interests and experience and my research focuses on the history of orientalism and the transcultural history of knowledge in the context of colonialism and empire, in particular, the transfer of knowledge from Asia to Europe. My undergraduate degree was at St. Xavier's College, Bombay, followed by an M.Phil at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford and a PhD at Queens’ College, Cambridge. I have also studied at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, a Zukunftsphilologie Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and, most recently, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of History, Cambridge which I held in conjunction with a Research Associateship at St. John’s College Cambridge. |
Hamid Tafazoli (University of Bielefeld)
Hamid Tafazoli is Privatdozent of German Literature and of Intercultural Studies at the Department of German of the University of Bielefeld. He graduated with a MA in German and Comparative Literature, Linguistics and Indo-European Languages at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster. As scholarship holder of the Goethe-Institute, he has received a certificate of the Goethe-Institute and of the University of Kassel for Teaching Foreign Languages. He has a Ph.D. in German Literature, Linguistics and Indo-European Languages from the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster with the monograph “Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs” (2007). Before he came to the University of Bielefeld, he was Senior Researcher at the Institute of German Language, Literature and for Intercultural Studies at the University of Luxembourg. He also was Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, research assistant and instructor at the Department of Germanics of the University of Washington in Seattle. Tafazoli's major fields of research and teaching are literary theory, German literature from 1700 to 1900, German contemporary literature, Persian Language & Culture from ancient to the modern Iran. He is also interested in the encounter between European and Persian Literature and Culture in the period of 1700 to 1900 as well as in the modern period, Literature and Human Rights, Postcolonial Studies, and Intercultural Studies. He is the author of the monograph Narrative kultureller Transformationen (2019) and Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs, co-author of the collection of essays on Persien im Spiegel Deutschlands (2018) and Außenraum – Mitraum Innenraum (2012) and author of many articles on German and Persian Literature. |