Events
2024
NES seminars meeting from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, West Seminar room.
October 2: NES Seminar, Tatars of the Sudan: Place, Race, and Power in Ibn Saʿīd’s Kitāb al-jughrāfiyā, Hannah Barker (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Arizona State University).
October 16: NES Seminar: Seventeenth Century Humanistic Editorial Practices, George A. Kiraz (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute).
October 25: Book launch, Imagining the Heavens across Eurasia from Antiquity to Early Modernity, edited by Rana Brentjes, Sonja Brentjes and Stamatina Mastorakou. Book Introduction and event Program. Pre-registration is required. Sponsored by Professors Sabine Schmidtke and Myles Jackson (IAS School of Historical Studies).
November 6: NES Seminar, Mediating Siyāsa and Sharīʿa: Ibn al-Jawzī's Reassessment of Ruler-Scholar Relations, Han Hsien Liew (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Arizona State University).
November 8, 12:00-1:00 pm: NES and Digital Scholarship @IAS virtual event: ARSHEEF: Getting Closer to Libraries and Archives, Athina Pfeiffer and Mathias Ghyoot (Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University). ARSHEEF is a collaborative project and a website that makes available up-to-date guides to libraries and archives across North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and South Asia, as well as digital options for those who cannot travel. For the recording of this event visit https://www.ias.edu/hs/islamic-world/videos.
November 13: NES Seminar, Al-Tīfāshī's Book of Erotica and its Islamic Introduction, Matthew Keegan (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Barnard College).
November 20: NES Seminar, Thinking Together, Sometimes at Cross-Purposes: Medieval Middle Eastern Intellectual Life in a Diverse Society, Thomas Carlson (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Oklahoma State University).
2025
NES seminars meeting from 12:00 to 1:30 pm, West Seminar room.
February 3, 12:00-1:20 pm, 202 Jones Hall, Near Eastern Studies at Princeton: The Making of the Muslim Middle East: Surprising Answers to the When and How of Medieval Islamization Thomas A. Carlson (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Oklahoma State University). Additional details.
February 5, 12:00-1:00 pm: NES, Digital Scholarship @IAS and Beth Mardutho virtual event: Simtho Unveiled: Launch of the World’s Most Comprehensive Syriac Corpus. Join us for the official launch of the next version Simtho, the most comprehensive digital corpus of Syriac texts ever assembled. This landmark release represents over five years of dedicated work, from its initial beta version of 6 million words to its current size of over 25 million words. Leveraging cutting-edge OCR technology, artificial intelligence, and the meticulous efforts of the MelthoLab, this first formal release offers unprecedented access to Syriac literary heritage. Attendees will learn how Simtho's vast collection of Syriac texts—spanning printed books and manuscripts—has been curated, corrected, and expanded. Discover how natural language processing (NLP) advances have enabled part-of-speech tagging and integration with the Sedra lexical resources, enhancing the corpus’s functionality for scholars, students, and linguists alike. This session will also highlight the scholarly, educational, and technological significance of Simtho for the fields of Syriac studies, linguistics, and digital humanities. Join us to celebrate this major achievement and explore the future possibilities it unlocks for research and education. Don’t miss this opportunity to witness the unveiling of a transformative resource for Syriac studies. Registration is required: https://bit.ly/SimthoUnveiled.
February 19, NES Seminar, Ideology, Technology and the Reconfiguration of Islamic Textuality in 17th and 18th-century China, Dror Weil (School of Historical Studies, IAS and King's College, Cambridge).
February 26, 12:00-1:00 pm: NES and Digital Scholarship @IAS virtual event: Opportunities and Challenges for Indexing a Polyglot Society: The Development of HIMME, Thomas A. Carlson (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Oklahoma State University). More languages and literary traditions existed simultaneously in the medieval Middle East than any individual scholar can hope to master. Disciplinary norms have mandated that scholars focus on one or perhaps two languages, but the actual historical society was bewilderingly polyglot. Can digital methods provide an opportunity for overcoming our individual scholarly limitations? On the other hand, what dynamics of multilingual cultures challenge modern digital approaches themselves? This talk will open a conversation centered around the development of the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME: https://medievalmideast.org/). Register at https://bit.ly/HIMME.
March 12: NES Seminar, The Discovery and Study of the al-Khānjī Archive, Garrett Davidson (School of Historical Studies, IAS and College of Charleston) and Rana Mikati (School of Historical Studies, IAS and College of Charleston).
April 2: NES Seminar, Beyond Innovation and Imitation: The Post-Formative Development of Islam in Light of Medieval Religious Diversity, Thomas A. Carlson (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Oklahoma State University).
April 10-11: NES Workshop, The Visual Scribe: Tables and Diagrams in Middle Eastern Manuscripts Workshop. Conveners: George A. Kiraz (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Mathieu Ossendrijver (Freie Universität Berlin), Sabine Schmidtke (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) and Sonja Brentjes (Independent Scholar). See Call for Proposals.
April 16: NES Seminar, To be announced, Ioannis Papadogiannakis (School of Historical Studies, IAS and King’s College London).
April 23: NES Seminar, Shah Wali Allah (d.1762) and the Ambiguities of Islamic Cosmopolitanism, SherAli Tareen (School of Historical Studies, IAS and Franklin & Marshall College).
September 4-5, Maktabat al-Khānjī Archive Workshop hosted at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Details to be provided at a later time. This event is funded by the IAS Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Collaborative Research.