2006-07 Seminars
Seminar 1Title: "Sign Languages and Deaf Communities in the Middle East"
Guest Speaker: Prof. Ulrike Zeshan (University of Central Lancashire)Date: Tuesday, 21 November 2006 Time: 4-5.30p.m Venue: Dover Street B.S.2
Prof. Ulrike Zeshan is the director of the new International Centre for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies at the University of Central Lancashire. She is a linguist with a PhD from the University of Cologne and has been involved in sign language research for more than a decade, having conducted fieldwork on sign languages in Pakistan, India, Turkey, and Lebanon. She was head of the Sign Language Typology Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands before coming to Preston. Her research focuses on the documentation of sign languages in non-Western countries and on large-scale comparative studies of grammatical structures - such as negation, questions and possession - across sign languages around the world. She is involved in applied work for curriculum and materials development together with NGOs and governmental departments serving deaf communities in India and in Turkey, and is the founder and president of the Deaf Empowerment Foundation in the Netherlands.
Seminar 2Title: "The Role of the Midrashim in the Textual Transmission of the Hebrew Bible: Building the Masorah"
Guest speaker: Dr. Elvira Martín Contreras (Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Spanish High Council for Scientific Research, Department of Biblical and Ancient East Philology, Philology Institute, Madrid, Spanish High Council for Scientific Research) Date: Tuesday, 7th November 2006 Time: 4-5.30p.m. Venue: Dover Street B.S.2
Masorah is the name used for the collected body of instructions used to preserve from change the text of the Hebrew Bible and the way it was written. The scholars who developed and transmitted these notes are called masoretes, and worked in the period 500-900 CE. But what happened between the moment in which the biblical consonantal text was fixed and the appearance of the Masorah, five centuries later? How was the biblical text preserved in the meantime? This paper presents my current research project, which aims to trace the history and development of the textual traditions included in the Masorah in the period before its appearance. To fulfil this objective, the whole of the midrashic literature prior to that date is being analysed. My work thus far on the parallels in text and terminology between the Masorah and Genesis Rabbah, Lamentations Rabbah, Sifre Numbers, Sifra Leviticus, Mekiltah of Rabbi Yismael and Leviticus shows the relevance of the midrashim in general, and the aggadic ones in particular, in the transmission of the textual traditions that built the Masorah.
Seminar 3Title: "Privatizing Foreign Policy: How America's Middle East Policy is Really Made"
Guest Speaker: Professor Lawrence Davidson (West Chester University, USA)Date: Tuesday, 13th March 2007 Time: 4-5.30p.m. Venue: S1.7 Lime Grove Humanities Building
Lawrence Davidson is a Professor of Middle East History at West Chester University in West Chester Pennsylvania. His specialization is in the history of American relations with the Middle East. He is the author of two recent books: Americas Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University Press of Florida, 2001) and Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003). Presently, he is working on a book entitled "Privatizing Foreign Policy" for the University of Kentucky Press. He has also written numerous articles on US perceptions of and policies toward the Middle East. He has travelled extensively in the region. Over the last twenty years Professor Davidson has taken on the role of a public intellectual and has sought to heighten public awareness of the nature and consequences of US policies in the Middle East.
Seminar 4Title: "Between Missionary Schools and the Women's Press: 'Domesticity' as a Marker of Arab Cultural Identity in the Modern Period"
Speaker: Professor Hoda Elsadda (University of Manchester) Date: Tuesday, 13th February 2007 Time: 4-5.30p.m. Venue: S1.7 Lime Grove Humanities Building
Professor Hoda Elsadda currently holds a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University. In 1992, she co-founded and co-edited Hagar, an interdisciplinary journal in women's studies published in Arabic. In 1997, she co-founded (and was Director between 1997-2000; and 2004-2005) the Women and Memory Forum, a research organization which brought together researchers and activists focusing on rereading Arab cultural history from a gender-sensitive perspective. She has co-authored and edited several books in Arabic on gender and Arab cultural history. Amongst her articles in English: "Gendered Citizenship: Discourses on Domesticity in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, in Hawwa: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 4:1 (2006) pp.1-28; "Discourses on Women's Biographies and Cultural Identity: Twentieth Century Representations of the Life of `Aisha Bint Abi Bakr, in Feminist Studies, 27:1 (Spring 2001), pp.37-64.