Learning Arabic Backwards: Was It Absolutely Frightening?

Date: 

Wednesday, March 23, 2022, 5:00pm to 6:30pm

Location: 

Online (Zoom registration info below)

CMES is pleased to present the 2022 H.A.R. Gibb Arabic & Islamic Studies Lecture Series with

Michael Cooperson
Professor of Arabic, University of California, Los Angeles

Register in advance: https://bit.ly/3GVY4Bc

Information about the second lecture in this two-part series can be found here: https://bit.ly/3toGwbU.

Please note: This lecture will be online via Zoom, and everyone wishing to attend should register using the link above. Limited in-person seating for Harvard students and faculty may become available. If so, Harvard students and faculty who have registered will be notified of the campus location for the talk. This process will be by invitation only.

Arabic has been acquiring new speakers for some 1400 years. Beginning around 1120, many learners studied the language by reading one of the complex texts ever written in it. Full of puns, allusions, riddles, lipograms, and palindromes, al-Hariri's Impostures can baffle even proficient speakers. Even more oddly, the seventeenth-century Dutch Orientalists who introduced the work to Europe also presented it as a teaching text. How could Impostures serve that purpose, and what does the answer tell us about the dissemination of hegemonic languages in pre- and early modern times? 

Michael Cooperson is Professor of Arabic in the Department of Near Eastern Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the American University in Cairo, and Harvard University. His research focuses on the cultural history of early Islamic Iraq, the topic of his two monographs Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of al-Ma’mun and Al-Mamun. His translations from Arabic include Ibn al-Jawzī's biography of the dissident ascetic Ibn Hanbal; it won the Sheikh Hamad Prize for Translation and International Understanding in 2016. His Englishing of al-Hariri's word-gaming Impostures (NYU Press, 2020) won a 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the translation category and was shortlisted for ALTA's National Translation Award. He is also the translator of Abdelfattah Kilito’s The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture from French. His other interests include Maltese and Modern Greek language and culture. 

Contact: Liz Flanagan