“Reading Aljamiado Mansucripts”
Mediterranean Studies Summer Skills Seminar
2—5 August 2022 • Remote
The Summer Skills Seminar, “Reading Aljamiado Manuscripts” was held via TEAMS from Tuesday, 2 August, to Friday, 5 August from 9am to 11am and noon to 2pm MDT. Each session consisted of a combination of lecture and sight-reading of documents in aljamía.
Faculty
The course will be conducted by Prof. Nuria de Castilla (History of the Book in Arabic Script, École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL, Paris). A specialist in Arabic Manuscripts, her main research fields are Aljamiado Literature, Arabic Codicology and Paleography and Cultural History in Early Modern Europe, with special attention to Muslim-Christian relations.
Program
Tuesday, 2 August 2022
9am-11am; noon-2pm
1. Introduction. A Secret Culture in Golden Age Spain.
2. Let’s begin reading
Wednesday, 3 August 2022
9am-11am; noon-2pm
1. Travelling in Morisco times
2. While preaching in in the same period
Thursday, 4 August 2022
9am-11am; noon-2pm
1. Cornerstone
2. Other famous texts
Friday, 5 August 2022
9am-11am; noon-2pm
1. Problems with reading Aljamiado texts
2. Encore! The Qur’an in Mudéjar and Morisco communities
Participants
Susan Shoshan Abraham (Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese: University of Virginia)
Susan Abraham is a daughter of the Assyrian diaspora, a member of the Thkuma clan with roots in Chicago and the village of Mazra’ya in present day Yaylak, Diyarbakır. She is a first-generation college student and currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish, Italian,and Portuguese at the University of Virginia where she studies early modern Iberian and Mediterranean literature and culture. Susan’s research focuses on the textual and cultural production of exiled Iberian Muslims, or Moriscos, living in the Mediterranean diaspora through theological and doctrinal treatises that were composed or circulated in Tunisia. Her dissertation, “Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in Tunis and the Early Modern Mediterranean”, approaches the history of the Morisco diaspora by focusing on extant seventeenth-century didactic and devotional texts. In particular, this dissertation explores how Morisco discursive practices in exile negotiate among Islamic, Spanish, and diasporic modes of cultural and religious production in order to engage their readers in religious practices, ritual performance, and affective entanglements.
Saqer A. Almarri is a research fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi's Humanities Research Fellowship for the Study of the Arab World. He holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Binghamton University—State University of New York. His work primarily explores how gender variance is perceived, conceptualized, and developed over time among pre-modern Arabic and Muslim writers with a focus on writings on intersexuality. Saqer’s previous work has been published in Body & Religion; Women & Language, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Saqer can be contacted at saa9091@nyu.edu. He is a 2019 graduate of Binghamton University—State University of New York’s Translation Studies program, where he wrote a dissertation on the legal doctrines of the khunthā [intersex person], as described by Mamlūk Shāfiʿī jurists. The research included the production of a critical edition and partial translation of al-Isnawī’s Īḍāḥ, a comprehensive legal treatise on doctrines concerning the khunthā. He is currently a research fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi developing a book manuscript concerning the conception of gender, and gender variance, among pre-modern ulamā and udabā.
My research concentrates on the fascinating religiosity of moriscos in 16th-century Iberia. My dissertation explores the ways in which some notable crypto-Muslim scholars attempted to preserve and retain their Islamic identity using eclectic and sometimes innovative means. I am particularly interested in the writings of Mancebo de Arevalo and how his texts elucidate the hybridity and originality of moriscos.
Julia Banzi (Music: Portland State University, Lewis & Clark College, University of Portland)
I am an ethnomusicologist (Ph.D. University of California at Santa Barbara) especially interested in constructing historical ethnographies—that is seeking ways in understanding how the long past influences and shapes present musical changes.
My special interest is the melding of varied cultures and religions converging in Al-Andalus (711-1492). In Morocco, my focus on women’s Andalusian ensembles led to my Master Thesis which placed these ensembles back on the historical record. I am developing this into a book. In Spain, I have focused on the flamenco guitar tradition and the processes of when, why, and how performance traditions become obsolete (Doctoral Dissertation: Flamenco Guitar and the Circumscription of Tradition). I am the co-artistic director of the recently defunct international performance ensemble Al-Andalus, artist, composer and one of a very few female flamenco guitarists worldwide. My work reflects over twenty years of living, studying and performing worldwide. Most noteably in Spain and Morocco. I am a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar and teach ethnomusicology and guitar at Portland State University, Lewis & Clark College and the University of Portland. I attended the NEH Summer Institute in Barcelona in 2012 which was lifechanging. I am eager to further inform my scholarship. I am passionate about my work and honored and excited to take this seminar on Reading Aljamiado Manuscripts with Prof. Nuria de Castilla.
Ilil Baum (The Buber Society of Fellows: The Hebrew Unirsity of Jerusalem)
Ilil Baum is a postdoctoral fellow at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a lecturer of Ladino at the Hebrew University and at the University of Oxford. Baum earned her PhD from the Hebrew University (2018). Previously she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Frankel Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and the Cohn Institute at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the interplay of language and identity among the Jews of Spain on the eve of their expulsion; and on the emergence of Sephardic identity after 1492 in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb, and in comparison to similar phenomena among Muslims and Moriscos in Spain. She is currently completing her monograph on Language and Identity among the Jews of Christian Spain, which studies the reading and translation practices among the Jewish elites of the time. Her latest articles were published in Medieval Encounters and the Jewish Quarterly Review.
Farah Bazzi was born in Lebanon and raised in The Netherlands. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in early modern global history at Stanford University. Farah’s work attempts to bridge both Mediterranean and Atlantic history by focusing on how objects, people, and imaginations moved between the Ottoman world, Morocco, Iberia, and the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Furthermore, Farah’s research interests include environmental thought, race, indigeneity, cosmology, cartography, and technologies of conquest. In her dissertation, Farah looks at the expulsion of the moriscos and their presence in the Americas, Morocco, and the Ottoman Empire from a socio-environmental perspective. In addition to this, Farah is interested the construction of Al-Andalus as an aesthetically appealing, pursuable, and transplantable natural and racialized landscape in Spanish, Arabic, and Ottoman sources.
Currently, Farah is one of the project founders and managers of the ‘Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic’ project sponsored by CESTA, the History Department, and the Division of Languages and Cultures. She is also the graduate coordinator for the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) at Stanford and the Graduate Student Counselor (director) on the board of the Renaissance Society of America (RSA).
Manuela Ceballos (Religious Studies: University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
I am currently Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. My scholarly interests include ritual purity, the body, and Moroccan Sufism, and Christian-Muslim relations during the early modern period. I have published articles on Sufism in Morocco, Christian mysticism, and interreligious exchange. Currently, I am working on my first monograph, tentatively titled Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Power, and Sainthood in the Western Mediterranean.
I hold a PhD in Hispanic Literatures with a specialization in the Middle Ages by Cornell University. Currently, I am starting a new and exciting chapter at William & Mary as an Assistant Professor of Spanish. My research and teaching interests focus on cultural hybridity which I study through the concepts of translation and border. I also work on the uses of the medieval past in current cultural and political spheres.
Khadija Harsolia (Spanish Language and Culture: Soka University)
Khadija Harsolia’s present studies include a revised analysis of El Poema de Yusuf. Khadija is also interested in the Arabo-Hispanic linguistic legacy with respect to Arabic loan words and other "hispanized" terms used by Mudejars and Moriscos, which may persist in contemporary Spanish. She's also interested in exploring Andalusí-Latin American cultural connections from the early modern period to present. Currently, she teaches at Soka University and Chapman University as a lecturer of Spanish. Meanwhile, Khadija continues her decades long studies in the science of Tajwid, the art of recitation of the Quran. Lastly, she enjoys making natural soaps at her home in California where she resides with her husband and children.
Alex Korte (University of Minnesota Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
Alex Korte is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in medieval Iberian literature (2023). His dissertation, titled "Under the Predatory Flag: Medieval Tales of Iberian Piracy" focuses on representations of piracy and human trafficking in medieval Iberian literature. Chapters focus on the Cantigas de Santa María, Libro de Apolonio, Poema de Yúçuf, and Cervantes’s Moriscos. Other research interests include adventure narratives and Mediterranean cultural networks. Most recently, he submitted an article for publication to eHumanista on Libro de Alexandre, and this summer he received funding to consult the aljamiado text Poema de Yúçuf in the Biblioteca Nacional Madrid. Alex also works with Foreign Language pedagogy. As part of a team of educators, he designed and implemented course curricula that fosters Advanced-level (ACTFL) speaking functions in upper-division FL content courses. He co-published this research in Developing Advanced Speaking Proficiency (2019). Alex is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, having served in the Water and Sanitation Sector in Piura, Perú, from 2015-17.
Paige Milligan (late of Near East Studies: University of Michigan)
I recently completed my Ph.D. in Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. I defended my dissertation, titled “After al-Andalus / Palestine: Resistance and Collaboration in Morisco and Palestinian Literatures,” in January 2022. As the title suggests, I specialize in the comparative study of modern Palestinian literature and the writing of early modern Moriscos (forcibly converted Muslims in sixteenth-century Spain). My work contributes to larger debates in postcolonial studies, memory studies, and the history of minorities. I am particularly interested in groupings that break out of older “area studies” divisions, including the growth of “Mediterranean studies” as well as scholarship focusing on modern Arabic representations of al-Andalus. As a teacher, I have taught Arabic language and culture courses, as well as ESL, and am particularly supportive of efforts to provide language instruction to migrant and refugee students according their needs and requests. Currently, I am continuing to develop my dissertation, focusing on Mudejar-era precedents for Morisco-aljamiado texts as well as broadening my theoretical bases, and my knowledge of Palestinian 1950s-60s periodical publications.
Clare O'Brien (Comparative Literature and Languages : University of California, Riverside)
Clare O’Brien is a Ph.D. candidate in UC Riverside’s Comparative Literature and Language Department. Her research compares the collection of Arabic short stories, Kalila wa Dimna, and Aljamiado literature as intersection points of wisdom literature in both the Arabic and Spanish traditions. Outside of her research, Clare has taught the Arabic language as well as English Composition in universities throughout Southern California.
Seher Rowther (World Languages and Culture: Chapman University)
Dr. Seher Rabia Rowther completed her Doctorate in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Her research focuses on reiterations of epistemic violence and coloniality portrayed in contemporary fiction and film which reimagine the conquests of medieval Iberia and colonial Latin America. She is interested in fiction as a creative space to reinscribe relegated perspectives of colonized and displaced communities, and as a means to decenter Eurocentric, Orientalist frameworks upon conceptualizations of the past and the present. Her dissertation discusses Darren Aronofsky’s film, The Fountain, Radwa Ashour’s Granada Trilogy, and Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account. She is currently a Lecturer of Spanish at Chapman University.
Marina Schneider (Art History: University of Texas at Austin)
Marina Schneider is a second year PhD student in the Department of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. She works on medieval and early modern Iberia, focusing on how Iberia’s Islamic past informs artistic traditions on the Peninsula and in Viceregal Latin America. She is also interested in how reimagining’s and invocations of Al-Andalus in the 19th and 20th centuries informed discourses on Nationalism and identity.
Elizabeth Spragins is Assistant Professor in Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross. She earned her PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures from Stanford University in 2017. Her research focuses on prose narrative from the early modern Western Mediterranean in Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, with particular attention to questions of identity, authority, and multicultural exchange. Her book, A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean, forthcoming in 2022 with Fordham University Press and winner of the ACLA’s Helen Tartar First Book Prize, investigates how narrators ground knowledge through representations of corpses in Mediterranean historiography. Her research has been published in La corónica and ConSecuencias and is forthcoming in Teaching Race in the Renaissance, Cervantine Futurisms, On the Uses and Abuses of Early Modern Spanish Culture, and La corónica.
Reem Taha (Comparative Literature: University of California, Santa Barbara)
Reem Taha is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation project focuses on the early modern Western Mediterranean; she is interested in Muslim-Christian relations, travel narratives, and exile, with a particular emphasis on the Morisco community.
Doctor Jessica Zeitler's work focuses on the intersection of the diffusion of knowledge and culture and the development of intellectual spaces in the Medieval and Golden Age Iberian Peninsula and the Near East. In addition to her Ph.D. in Medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature and history with a Minor in Near Eastern Studies and Arabic, she holds a Master of Science in Education. This combined background supports her work as a faculty and instructional designer researching how educational spaces, cultural and social capital, and the diffusion of knowledge impact past and present societies.
Participant Impressions
“Nuria is a wonderful teacher: effective (we were all reading by the end of the course), encouraging, effective.”
“Nuria is so lovely! And I really feel like I got a different perspective and a lot of good background info on some "canonical" texts, and on the texts we worked on in particular. The reading practice itself was very appropriately paced, ramping up over the 4 days, and doing it as group work was a wonderful experience, as other participants from different linguistic/academic backgrounds often would catch things you missed - we each brought something different to the task of reading.”
“Doctor de Castilla is incredibly knowledgeable, smart, and just as importantly, inviting. She is obviously an expert in her field as well as an effective teacher. I liked the lecture/group reading structure of the course, as it allowed me to learn both from her as well as the diverse professional experiences of my colleagues.”
“She provided everything we needed in terms of samples and bibliography. She was incredibly responsive and respectful of our time, and immensely patient with any of the technological hiccups we had. We completed every topic in the schedule she laid out for the course. It was intense, but Nuria made it very easy for us and the way she tied all the lectures, discussions and activities together made all the practical elements of transcribing the texts and the historical significance really hit home. Such an amazing experience.”
“This format within the Mediterranean Seminar is such an excellent tool. It is not just something I would want to put on my Resume/CV to show my continued research activities over the summer...I believe it will prove truly productive for people to get connected, networks to be built, work to get done and published, and circulated. I did not know about the amazing work Nuria is doing until this seminar...and through the seminar itself I got to see the amazing work being done by others. Overall, this seminar created a desire for further conversations over coffee to be had.”