Uncovering Voices of the Past: Society in the Pre-Modern Eastern Mediterranean | Dana Sajdi
In this conversation, we talked to Dana Sajdi about the history, societies, and cultures of the pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean (the Levant, Egypt, and Turkey).
Dana Sajdi is an associate professor of history at Boston College. She teaches various courses on Islamic history but specializes in the history, societies, and cultures of the pre-modern Eastern Mediterranean (the Levant, Egypt, and Turkey). Her earlier work has focused primarily on the production of texts by unusual authors, such an 18th-century barber, Ibn Budayr (The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant [Stanford UP, 2013]) and an 8th-century female poet, Layla al-Akhyaliyyah (“Trespassing the Male Domain,” Journal of Arabic Literature, 2000). Her current project, In Defense of Damascus: Arabic Textual Cityscapes is also about textual production, but this time the subject is descriptions of the venerable city, Damascus. She has identified an uninterrupted tradition of these prose topographies between the 12th and 20th centuries and is treating them like pictorial cityscapes through which to write the Islamic history of Damascus over centuries.
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The afikra Podcast
The afikra Podcast is our flagship series featuring experts from academia, art, media, urban planning, and beyond, who are helping document and shape the histories and cultures of the Arab world through their work.
