Seminars

Much recent scholarship has been concerned with how to make sense of Islam’s multiple valences: sharīʿah (divine law) vs. adab (cultivation, ethical norms, 文). In this talk, I argue that philology—in particular, grammar and rhetoric—served as a connective tissue linking these varied approaches to Islam in the Persian-using world. Through analysis of Persian philological sources from the early modern Ottoman empire, Mughal India, and Qing China, I advance a theory of Persianate Islam.

Onomastics, the study of names and naming, has a long and complex history going back to ancient Greece and especially to Plato’s Cratylus. In the past century or so, however, it has become a multidisciplinary field of study practiced mainly by scholars in the social sciences. And yet, names and naming can connect past and present, help generate collective memory, and enhance a sense of community—exactly the subjects that philologists actively seek. This talk will argue, then, that the study of names and naming can shed light on various philological subjects, and that onomastics may in turn benefit from philologists’ expertise and insight. It will use documents issued by the International Council of Onomastic Sciences and the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names to discuss various cases of toponyms (both indigenous and colonial) and ethnonyms (ancient, medieval, and modern). The talk will further explore the cultural and political landscape of early medieval Britain by analyzing poetic, hagiographical, and legal texts, written in both English and Latin.

The study of philology in premodern South Asia has almost exclusively focused on texts. This has yielded a number of insights about forms of commentary, text criticism, authorship, and interpretation, but it leaves us no closer to understanding how philology was lived, let alone how it was deployed among and against people in the world. A small but tantalizing collection of Sanskrit oral debate records presents an opportunity to examine philology in its kinetic form, that is, as a technology of making sense of texts that was dynamic, oppositional, and crucial to the exercise of power. This talk examines a single event: in the early 1600s, an upstart king in southwest India hosted rival scholars to debate the mechanisms and metaphysics of death. A close reading of the event affords an opportunity to not only reflect on the remarkable philological expertise of early modern intellectuals in action, but to locate the articulation of philological expertise within asymmetrical fields of power. Here we find that the success of argument had as much to do with its philological acuity as to do with privilege and social status.

Malcolm X is broadly remembered as an icon of the struggle for Black freedom. This was in no small part due to his remarkable oratorical mastery. Within African-American lore, his feats of speech were all the more impressive given the narrative of his “homemade education” while imprisoned, an experience symbolized by the figure of the aardvark. Starting with this peculiar image from his Autobiography, I demonstrate that Malcolm was also a philological thinker who considered the love of study a valid pursuit in its own right. Moreover, I show how Malcolm’s philology, one that viewed words as constitutive of the world, and one that emerged from a popular style of reasoning, might be mobilized in the study of the global African diaspora. In so doing, I also re-cast the history of philology that otherwise privileges an origin story of European exceptionalism. To make this argument, I rely on a close reading of the Autobiography co-written with Alex Haley as well as the journals that he kept during his travels to Africa and the Middle East, informed by but not constrained to the historical record. The result is an image of a Black philology in action.