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Seth Kimmel (Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University): "Arabic in the Margins"

Date: 
Monday, 14 November 2011 - 12:00pm - 2:00pm
Location: 
Pigott Hall (Building 260), Room 216
Speaker: 
Seth Kimmel (Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University)
Focal Group: 
Renaissances

We are pleased to invite you to the first Renaissances meeting of the academic year.  Seth Kimmel, Stanford Mellon Fellow, will present his current book project and lead a conversation about his work, including the discussion of various practical, methodological, and disciplinary issues facing an early career scholar.  

Lunch will be provided.


Below, please find a brief summary of Seth's work along with a short bio.
Please contact Deb Tennen (dtennen@stanford.edu) or Cici Malik (cjmalik@stanford.edu) with any questions.

 
Arabic in the Margins
 
Seth’s first book project, Erasing the Difference: The End of Islamic Iberia and the Transformation of the Disciplines, argues that debates about New Christian integration shaped legal discourse, comparative philology, and history writing in early modern Iberia. Focusing on the philological component of the story, this workshop will explore how Iberian Hebraists and Biblical scholars used their inexpert Arabic knowledge to redefine the professional standards and pedagogical paradigms of their fields. We will both discuss how this history of Iberian scholarship fits into recent work in Early Modern Studies, Golden Age Spanish Literature, and Religious Studies, and address practical questions about methodology, archival research, and the process of writing a dissertation and revising it into a book.

* * *

Seth Kimmel studies the literatures and cultures of medieval and early modern Iberia. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Stanford’s Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities in 2010. Seth’s research interests include theories of secularism and religion, manuscript and early print culture, the history of cartography, and colonial narrative.

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