Guest professorship ‘Women in Manuscript Cultures’Understanding Books as Objects, Belongings, RelationsInterview with Suzanne Akbari

21 May 2024

Photo: Suzanne Akbari

This summer, medievalist Suzanne Akbari is visiting professor of 'Gender in Manuscript Cultures' at the CSMC. In our interview, she talks about the links between her seemingly disparate research interests and how she aims to diversify our understanding of global book history.

Suzanne Akbari, looking at your academic career, the first thing that catches the eye is the range of topics you have worked on. To name just a few, you have written about optics and allegories, depictions of Islam and the orient in literature, the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and the global history of the book. How would you describe your profile as a researcher?

It’s always difficult to look in the mirror, but I would say that throughout my work, I have always been interested in systems of thought. How do we organise knowledge, how do we approach it, and how do we situate ourselves in relation to that knowledge? In my first book, the one on optics and allegory, I aimed at bringing two very different discourses together: it looked at literary history in a range of different European vernaculars and Latin in the context of scientific theories of optics. In my second book, Idols in the East, I was interested, on the one hand, in how Europeans viewed Muslims, that is, how religious difference served to organise their perspective on the world. On the other hand, I was also looking at the idea of ‘the Orient’, that is, understanding the nature of people’s bodies, their behaviour, even their mental faculties in terms of the climate they live in.

In my most recent work, my colleagues and I look at global book history in a very targeted, local way, focussing on nine geographical areas. I work on the Great Lakes and Eastern Woodlands region and a couple of other areas, but I consider my main contribution to this project as methodological. How do we talk about the global medieval past, how do we structure and think about it? So, although it takes different forms each time, the focus on systems of thought has been central in each phase of my work.

I’m interested in a lot of things the relationship of which sometimes only becomes apparent when I am well into the project.

How do you translate this abstract approach into specific research topics? How do you determine what to focus on in each case?

We all have strengths and weaknesses. One of my weaknesses is that I have a very short attention span. I remember a conversation with a senior colleague when I was a young researcher. She said: ‘When I finish this project, I will take some time to think about what to do next.’ I was flabbergasted. I never thought of a world in which we would finish a project and then think about the next one. For me, there is always a project in a very early, speculative stage, something this is partly advanced, something that is more advanced, and something that I really have to finish. I think that my research topics are not so heterogenous as they might look initially, but rather intertwined. I often find myself pursuing a project that is not obviously connected to any of the other things I have been working on, but further down the road I see how it fits, and I understand why I wanted to do it in the first place. I’m interested in a lot of things the relationship of which sometimes only becomes apparent when I am well into the project.

What do you primarily want to focus on while at the CSMC?

I mainly want to work on and present research from my ongoing project on global book history, the first part of which was called ‘The Book and the Silk Roads’ and which is now in its second phase, called ‘Hidden Stories’. I think this can be a valuable contribution to the Cluster, both in terms of the geographical area, which is otherwise not represented at the CSMC, and in terms of our methodology, which is to work with communities of origin in a very collaborative, iterative kind of way. One of the priorities of those communities is to identify and learn more about the belongings of their community that are now in museums and cultural heritage repositories. This summer, I hope to do more research not just with community members but for them, finding information about where these objects are and helping to arrange for them to visit or make reproductions of those items as part of the revival of Indigenous cultural knowledge.

My interest in gender issues has taken different shapes during different phases of my work.

In your current research, you also seem to pay much attention to the materiality of the books and manuscripts you are investigating. Have you always been interested in these material aspects or is that something that you have developed more recently?

The turn to materiality is definitely a recent phase. I have always been interested in manuscripts for what they can tell us about texts, especially multiple versions of a text. Now I also appreciate what else they can tell us, not just as objects but, as I am thinking about them now, also as belongings or even relations. There is a range of other terms that can be used to talk about books and manuscripts that is a little bit different from the way we are used to in our academic settings. That’s not to say that one way is right and the other is wrong, but it enriches and diversifies our understanding of the history and the ongoing life of the book.

How would you describe the relation between your research and the theme of the guest professorship ‘Gender in Manuscript Cultures’?

I’ve been interested in gender for a long time, and this has taken different shapes during different phases of my work. For example, I have written several articles about the medieval French writer Christine de Pizan. Her work was of interest to me in the context of my focus on optics and allegory early in my career. My current work is not obviously about gender, except if you think about gender – and perhaps more broadly: feminist approaches – as opening the door to areas of study and ways of formulating knowledge that are different from the way we are accustomed to. The methodologies we are using in ‘Hidden Stories’ are somewhat unorthodox compared the kinds of ways manuscript research often is pursued. The guest professorship, I take it, is about doing things differently.