Petra Kappert Fellows
Emad al-Din Sheikh al-Hokamaee (March 2024 - April 2024)
Contact(emad_hokamaii"AT"yahoo.com)
Emad al-Din Sheikh al-Hokamaee, Head of the ‘Epigraphy and Archives’ section at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Tehran, is a visiting scholar at the CSMC between 15 March and 15 April 2024.
Mr. Sheikh al-Hokamaee has authored more than one hundred articles on epigraphy, seals, paper, manuscripts, and archival documents of Islamic Iran, spanning from the early Islamic period up to the Qajar period. His notable monographs include the catalogue of the Ardabil documents, the most important series of judicial documents from Medieval Iran (Fihrist-ī asnād-i buqʿa-yi Shaykh Ṣafī al-Dīn Ardabīlī, 2009), and an edition of notarial documents contributing to the history of architecture (Asnād-i miʿmārī-yi Īrān, 2 volumes, 2009-10, second volume edited with I. Afshār). His latest books explore the evolution of epistolary writing in pre-modern Iran (Taḥawwul dar ādāb-i kitābat wa tarassul, 2020, with M. ʿUmrānī) and the local history of Southern Iran (Tārīkh-i Khalīj-i Fārs, 2024, with ‘A. Khayrandīsh). Since 2019, he has been a regular contributor to the scholarly journal Bokhārā with a series called ‘Awrāq-i sangīn’ dedicated to newly discovered inscriptions in Iran.
His most recent publications in English include (with D. Durand-Guédy) ‘The Deed of Sale of Bint Toghrïl (666/1267): a First In-Depth Study of the Ilkhanid Private Documents from the Mausoleum of Shaykh Ṣafī in Ardabil’ (JESHO, 67/1-2, 2024) and ‘The Inauspicious Rectangular in Iranian Scribal Practice’ (in F. Csirkés and B. Péri, eds., Mongols, Tatars, and Turks in the Persianate World. Festschrift in Honor of István Vásáry, Leiden, 2024).
Mr. Sheikh al-Hokamaee has conducted numerous teaching programmes on the reading of archival documents and calligraphy. Outside Iran, he delivered lectures at EPHE (Paris, 2008) and served as a lecturer at Philipps Universität Marburg from 2012 to 2014.
Emad Sheikh al-Hokamaee about his work at CSMC: During my stay at the CSMC, I will finalise an edition project on ‘Muḥammad Ṭāhir Iṣfahānī’s Ṣarīḥ Al-Milk, an Inventory of the Deeds Purchased by the Mausoleum of Shaykh Ṣafī in Seventeenth Century Iran’. I will also teach a masterclass on sigillography (18–19 March), take part in the workshop on ‘Manuscripts with Sample Letters in Late Medieval Eurasia’ (8–9 April) and give a Thursday Lecture on 12 April. |
Professor Dr Marco Franceschini (May 2023 - June 2023)
Marco Franceschini is Associate Professor at the University of Bologna. He obtained his PhD at the University of Turin (2005) with a research on Vedic studies (An Enhanced Vedic Concordance, Harvard University Press, 2007). Later on he focussed his research mainly on Indian classical poetry (kāvya) composed in Sanskrit (critical edition and translation of the Padyacūḍāmaṇi of Buddhaghoṣa, 2010; eight more articles in later years) and on South Indian palaeography and codicology, with a special interest for the Grantha script and the paratexts in manuscripts written in the Grantha and Tamil scripts (A Study on Scribal Colophons of Manuscripts Written in Tamil and Tamilian Grantha Scripts, 2016; five more articles in later years).
He has spent periods of research in India (Visiting Scholar at the EFEO, Pondicherry, 2008, 2009 2012), UK (University of Cambridge, 2013, 2014) and The Netherlands (Scaliger Fellow, Leiden University, 2015). He has taken part and is still participating in several international projects, based in Cambridge (UK), Delhi, Hamburg, Hamburg/Pondicherry, Naples L'"Orientale", Hamburg/Paris, Bologna.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Associazione Italiana di Studi Sanscriti (AISS).
Professor Dr Franceschini about his work at CSMC: During my stay in Hamburg, I will focus on the study of colophons in manuscripts hailing from the Tamil-speaking area of India, which I carry on in collaboration with PLMPI. This work will help highlight hitherto undetected scribal patterns that will eventually allow us to better appreciate the production and circulation of manuscripts in this important cultural area. Such an activity is specifically propaedeutic to the research goals of PLMPI, in particular in respect to its future mission to India, in order to select which palm-leaf manuscripts to analyse in the collection of more than 8,500 manuscripts held at the French Institute of Puducherry (IFP). |
Professor Dr J.R. Osborn (February 2023 - March 2023)
J.R. Osborn is Associate Professor of Communication, Culture & Technology (CCT) and Co-Director of the Iteration Lab at Georgetown University. He is both a scholar and experimentalist of communication. His work explores comparative media, semiotics, visual technologies, and design aesthetics. Dr Osborn’s book Letters of Light: Arabic Script in Calligraphy, Print, and Digital Design (2017, Harvard University Press), which follows the story of Arabic script from the calligraphic tradition to the Unicode standard, received the 2018 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize and an Honorable Mention for the 2018 Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He is also the co-author, with Bennetta Jules-Rosette, of African Art Reframed: Dialogues and Reflections on Museum Culture (2020, University of Illinois Press), and he has published a number of articles on design education and pedagogy. Dr Osborn holds a PhD in Communication and a Certificate in Ethnographic Film from the University of California-San Diego.
Professor Dr Osborn about his work at CSMC: While at CSMC, I will develop Diagrammatica, an online archive of diagrams and visualizations. The project emphasizes the diagram as a means of spatial reasoning and visual communication that iconically represents conceptual and methodological relations. I seek to contribute to a growing interdisciplinary interest in diagrams, particularly the intersection of manuscript practices and the iconicity of inscription. Emphasizing the diagram opens new horizons in archival research, the sociology and genealogy of knowledge, and intellectual exchange. To this end, I also wish to interview a number of CSMC scholars, asking where diagrams appear in their research, what work these diagrams perform, and how the diagrammatic traditions of manuscript cultures might inform future practice. |
Dr Chiara Ruzzier (September 2022 - February 2023)
After her degree in Literature at the Università de Trieste (Italy), Chiara Ruzzier obtained a PhD in History at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She then worked as a researcher at the Université de Namur and the Université catholique de Louvain on various projects focussed on manuscript production in medieval Western Europe and on incunabula. A codicologist and book historian, she specialises in the history of the production and use of Latin biblical manuscripts, to which she has devoted several publications, in particular on their material aspect. She has recently published a monograph on the process of miniaturisation of the Latin Bible in the 13th century (Entre Université et ordres mendiants. La production des bibles portatives latines au XIIIe siècle, De Gruyter, 2022).
Dr Ruzzier about her work at CSMC: During my stay at CSMC, I am working on a project on the architecture of Latin pandect Bibles during the Early Middle Ages. The project will focus on the relationship between content and material characteristics of the preserved complete Bibles before the year 1000 with the aim of better understanding their role in the history of written culture by analysing the changes in their structure over time and space. |
Dr Susana Torres Prieto (September - November 2022)
Susana Torres Prieto is Doctor in Slavic Philology and did her postdoctoral studies at the EPHE in Paris. She completed her studies on Slavic codicoloy and palaeography at the Hilandar Research Centre (Columbus-Ohio). She is Associate Professor of Humanities at IE University. Her research focuses on the transmission of literary and religious texts in the Slavic Middle Ages. She directed a project on Critical Editions of Slavic Apocrypha funded by the Spanish Government and her own critical edition of the Slavic Acta Pilati will appear next year in Brepols. She is the Scientific Director of a project focused on mapping Kyivan Rus’ artistic and literary patrimony at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). She has been Visiting Professor at Arizona State University and the Université de Lausanne and visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. Her main interests of research focus on the relation between the material means of production and the redefinition of literary and religious generic boundaries as well as the pivotal role of the scribe in Slavic monastic scriptoria.
Dr Torres Prieto about her work at CSMC: During my time at CSMC, I would like to analyse in depth the function of scribal colophons is Early East Slavic manuscripts as well as acquire a better understanding of those texts included in the miscellaneous works, whose contextualisation in a wider Byzantine and Oriental tradition has not been fully explored in Slavic yet. Ultimately, a close analysis of the materiality of the artefacts and of the texts included in them should tell us more about the scribal monastic culture in East Slavic. |