funded by an ERC Advanced Grant
We are happy to announce that our former postdoctoral researcher Matthew joins Barnard College of Columbia University as the Moinian Assistant Professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures. Until July 2019, Matthew worked on the theorization of fictive writing in pre-modern Arabic within our project. We wish Matthew all the best for his future in New York City!
Find out more about Matthew on his Academia.edu profile.
During the weekly Kalīla and Dimna research colloquium, Beatrice Gründler and her team discuss current research results. AnonymClassic team members and guests present ongoing work for critical analysis to their peers. Meetings take place each Thursday from 12-15 pm, in the Holzlaube building, room -1.1062, Dahlem campus.
In daily close reading sessions from April 3-6, 2019, our team picks up where we had left off in October 2018: Our expert advisor was Florinda de Simini, Indologist from L’Orientale (Naples University), who in December 2018 started with her project on “The Shivadharma and the Making of Regional Religious Traditions in Premodern South Asia”, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC), returns to Berlin to dive back into the Mahābhārata predecessors of the Kalīla and Dimna tales. Special guest is Kenji Takahashi from the University of Kyoto.
This close reading workshop is to be continued!
Theodore is a Persian and Arabic philologist who wrote his dissertation at the University of Chicago on the development of Persian literary anthologies in the late Timurid and early Safavid-Mughal periods. As part of the AnonymClassic team, Theodore will focus on the transmission, translation, and continual reworking of material connected to Kalīla wa-Dimna, with particular regard to the interplay between the Arabic and Persian traditions.
Johannes is a literary historian of the Arabic tradition with a PhD from the University of Bern. He has joined the AnonymClassic team in February 2019. He explores the indirect transmission of Kalila wa-Dimna in Arabic from the 9th century onward and the significance of linguistic variations within the corpus.
Find out more about Johannes here.
During the opening days at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Beatrice Gründler gave an interview on Arabic language and script cultures (German only).
The lectures focused on various aspects of the Arabic work Kalīla wa-Dimna and reached a large audience of students and scientists in both cities.
After a general introduction to the project by Beatrice Gründler, the Principal Investigator of the project, Marcus Pöckelmann (Halle) presented the project’s editing tool LERA, which provides an interactive, synoptic display by which similarities and differences between multiple textual versions can be analysed. Developed in Halle, it will be adapted and further developed in the project. The morning session ended with a paper by Matthew Keegan (Berlin) on the “Hermeneutics of Fiction in Classic Arabic Literature” and its potential impact on the reception of Kalīla and Dimna. In the afternoon session, Florinda de Simini (Naples) first introduced the Indian background of this work, then followed by a group reading session of selected passages of the Mahabharata in translation. After that, Christine van Ruymbeke (Cambridge) presented the 11thcentury Persian version by Nasrollah Monshi of the “Cat and Rat” chapter, which was also followed by a comparative reading session. The event concluded with a keynote lecture by Dimitri Gutas (Yale, Einstein Visting Fellow) on “the Leaven of Translation in the Rise of Translation in the Rise of the Medieval West (of India),” in which he threw light on the socio-historical motivations of translation between different cultures.
In our daily close reading sessions from October 21 until November 3, 2018, we explored the Indian origins of the Arabic Kalīla and Dimna texts. Our expert advisor was Florinda de Simini, Indologist from L’Orientale (Naples University) who is taking off with a project on “The Shivadharma and the Making of Regional Religious Traditions in Premodern South Asia”, funded by a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC).
This close reading workshop is to be continued!
