Video Lectures

We Are the Stars: Honoring Our Literary Ancestors, Sarah Hernandez (University of New Mexico). Online lecture followed by a conversation with Diane Wilson, author of The Seed Keeper.

Critically examining the U.S. as a settler colonial nation, this...

At the beginning of the 20th century, Syrian Catholic priest Paul Sbath (Aleppo, 1887 – Aleppo, 20 October 1946) obtained and consolidated a collection of 1,325 manuscripts, mainly acquired between Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo. In 1927, Sbath sold...

This talk will sketch the history of academic study of China in the U.S., beginning in 1920, with attention to how it differed from European Sinology. I see it as a story with intersecting trajectories, including U.S.-China relations and...

Max Meyerhof, born in 1874 as the only son of a German-Jewish family in Hildesheim, spent half his life in Cairo, where he died in 1945, shortly before the end of the war. He practiced as a successful ophthalmologist, who was said to be able to cure...

Gilles Ménage said of Louis Picques, the seventeenth-century Paris librarian and orientalist, that “to be his friend, one had to know Coptic, Egyptian, or Samaritan, or at least speak Arabic”. Picques’s letters show that he had many such friends...

The paper will present a survey of the scholarly correspondence of over 13,000 letters of the founder of European studies of Islam, Ignaz Goldziher (1850-1921), which is freely available in digitized form in the repository of the Library and...

The claim is absurd: everybody knows that the order of value goes the other way. By many commonly-cited criteria, physics is better than sociology. On their side, the natural sciences have Method, experiment, and quantification; they progress and...

Letters are considered some of the most valuable sources for historical research. Not only does their content cover a variety of different themes, events, persons, etc., but letters also depict networks between people. Yet due to editorial and...

The German born American scholar Leo Strauss has become a lasting influence on US foreign policy as well as the ideological discourse of the Chinese Communist Party. But at his times he was in quest of classic political philosophy, by which he...

Rukayyah Reichling (University of Amsterdam) and Kotoz Abdelhafiz Ahmed (Leuven Centre for the Study of Islam, Culture and Society)

The Goldziher Nachlass is remarkable in many ways: it is enormous, multilingual, well catalogued, and digitally...