Coming this fall: Al-Babtain visiting professor Wadad Kadi
This fall, LUCIS will have the pleasure of welcoming Professor Wadad Kadi, of the University of Chicago, to Leiden. She is the first Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain Cultural Foundation Visiting Professor in Arabic Culture at Leiden University.
First What’s New?! lecture
Professor Kadi will give the first lecture of the What’s New?! lecture series. In her lecture, she will talk about "Ibn Yūnus’s Use of Documentary Evidence in his History of Egypt." The lecture is free to join for everyone and is followed by drinks.
Master seminars about Umayyad epistolography
In addition, she will be teaching eight seminars in Dr. Peter Webb's MA course Themes in Arabic Literature: From Letters to Literature in the fall semester of the academic year 2018/2019.
In her seminars Professor Kadi will provide an in-depth study of the letters of the foremost epistolographer of the Umayyad period (41-132 AH/661-750 AD), ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Katib (d. 132 AH/750 AD), as a means to understanding Arabic letters and epistolary prose in the founding stage of Arabic epistolography.
Registration
MA students, PhD candidates and postdocs from Leiden University are invited to participate in Wadad Kadi's seminars provided that they have a sufficient level of proficiency of Arabic. Please send an email to lucis@hum.leidenuniv.nl to register for the master seminars of Professor Kadi.
About Wadad Kadi
Wadad Kadi is the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago, where she was Professor of Islamic Thought at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from 1988 until her retirement in 2009; she was also the Editor of the Journal of Near Eastern Studies there from 2007 until 2009. Born in Lebanon, she received her higher education at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and in Tübingen, Germany, and has taught at AUB, Harvard, Columbia, and Yale, before going to Chicago. During her career she received several honors and awards, including the King Faisal International Prize in Arabic Literature in 1994, the presidency of the American Oriental Society in 2004, and the Life Achievement Award by Middle East Medievalists in 2012; she has also been recently elected Honorary Member of the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants. For several years she was Associate Editor of E. J. Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an and the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, and co-editor of Brill’s book series “Islamic History and Civilization,” of which she is currently Honorary Editor.
Kadi has published widely on Islamic political thought, early Arabic prose, the impact of the Qur’an on Arabic literature, early Islamic history, and early Islamic theology and sectarianism, producing fourteen books, several of which are critical editions of Arabic manuscripts, and over 70 articles. Most recently she has been focusing on the Umayyad period: its historiography, administration, bureaucracy, and related areas.