Can we deepen our understanding of the origins of Middle East nationalism by studying the region's language ideologies?
| Historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists will come together to examine the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. |
This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to jointly study the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernized or quickly modernizing world. We also examine the role of developments in linguistics, philology, and adjacent disciplines in informing and shaping such ideas. Some of the questions that animate the discourses this project examines are: what does it mean for a language to be or become a modern language? Can, and should, a dead language be revived? Some of the questions the project leaders ask are: how do notions of native tongue, language family, vernacular dialect or register interact with concepts such as empire, nation, motherland? What role, if any, did language reformers think sacred languages should play? How does the relation between language and the body figure in projects of (re)generation of modern polities and individuals? By studying authors who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and their interaction with the political and cultural bodies and movements that played important roles in shaping the modern Middle East, this project aims to reconstruct, and draw new insights about, the rich nexus of language, identity, and modernity.
Assistant Professor of Turkish Literature
Bilkent University, Ankara
Esra Almas’s research focuses on the intersections of memory studies, diaspora, and the urban imaginary. Her current project is on Jewish memories of Istanbul. Through readings that prioritize sight, sound, taste, and thought, her studies probe how Jewish lives are inscribed in the fabric of the...
Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History
University of Chicago
Orit Bashkin is a historian who works on the intellectual, social and cultural history of the modern Middle East. She earned her PhD from Princeton University (2004), writing a thesis on Iraqi intellectual history under the supervision of Professors Robert Tignor and Samah Selim, and her BA...
Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World
University of Oxford
Marilyn Booth's most recent monograph, The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (2021), is among numerous publications on early feminism and Arabophone women’s writing in Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Initiator of the Ottoman Translation Studies...
Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics
University of Chicago
Itamar Francez works on semantics, pragmatics, and especially in how lexical, contextual, and pragmatic factors coalesce to bring about complex inferential behaviors. He also works on the role of interpretation in explaining morphological and morpho-syntactic generalizations within and across...
Historian
Annie Greene is a historian of intellectual and cultural production in the modern Middle East, particularly the role of language in creating, conveying, and challenging national revival movements. Her published journal articles examine the development of the Iraqi press and civic agency of the...
Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature
University of Chicago
Na'ama Rokem works on Modern Hebrew and German-Jewish literature. Her first book, Prosaic Conditions: Heinrich Heine and Spaces of Zionist Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2013) argues that prose - as a figure of thought, a mode, and a medium - played an instrumental role in...
Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish History
University of Chicago
A. Holly Shissler received her A.B. in Anthropology from Vassar College and her Ph.D. in History from UCLA. She specializes in the history of the later Ottoman Empire and early years of the Turkish Republic. Her particular interests are Ottoman and Turkish intellectual history, nationalism, and...
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Speakers at this conference examined the interplay between language reform and nation-building in the post-Ottoman era.
This conference will consider the role of language ideologies in the formation of Middle East nationalism.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Speakers at this conference examined the interplay between language reform and nation-building in the post-Ottoman era.
This conference will consider the role of language ideologies in the formation of Middle East nationalism.
