UCLA has the second-largest holding of Arabic-script manuscripts in the Americas, including what may be the region's largest collections of Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts. These treasures belong to at least twenty different collections that came to UCLA at various times and under different circumstances. As we seek to expand and enhance access to these materials through the Islamic Manuscript Initiative of UCLA Library Special Collections, we face the issue that the provenance of many of the collections is not well established. With the generous support of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Islamic Studies Program, the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies, and Library Special Collections, this event will draw attention to manuscript provenance by hosting five talks from scholars working in this field, most of whom will speak directly about the UCLA collections. The event will conclude with a collaborative research session in which a group of scholars from UCLA and beyond spends a few hours together poring over one of the less-well-known collections in an effort to shed light on its background and provenance.
Speakers:
Nir Shafir (UCSD), is a historian of the Middle East, in particular, the Ottoman Empire, between 1400-1800. His research focuses on the histories of communication, religion, and science and technology. Shafir’s first book, The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire, provides a unique and comprehensive description of the world of books, reading, and education in the early modern Ottoman Empire, detailing how “pamphlets” fractured this world by exacerbating the virulent and vicious socio-religious debates that polarized Ottoman society in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Garret Davidson (College of Charleston), is an associate professor of Arabic and Muslim World studies at the College of Charleston. His research examines the Islamic scholarly tradition, Arabic manuscript culture and provenance history. He has held fellowships at Princeton, Yale, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Chester Beatty Museum. Davidson is currently working on a monograph examining the recently discovered papers of Muḥammad Amīn al-Khānjī (d. 1939) and his role in the Islamic manuscript trade in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kathryn Babayan (University of Michigan), is a professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. Babayan is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She is a recipient of the 2024-25 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her current project, entitled The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins, which is a gendered history of reading practices in early modern Isfahan. Her most recent book, The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021), offers a model to study early modern urban culture through anthologies collected in Isfahan’s households.
Khalil Afzali, is an Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging Assistant (IMCA) at the UCLA Library Special Collections. He is the founder of the Baysunghur Research Institute in Afghanistan, which focuses on the study and preservation of the literary, cultural, and historical heritage of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran. In his research and teaching Afzali focuses on codicology, Sufism, literary history, and Bidel studies. He has published two books and more than 30 papers in Persian both in Iran and Afghanistan. He is also the chief editor of Nama-ye Baysunghur annual journal, which features work on Persian literature, art, and history.