“Lives in Turkish” is an ongoing research project held at Boğaziçi University Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. We trace the journey of life-writing in Turkish, collect metadata and visuals about biographical publications and biography subjects introduced to the Turkish reader since the early 1800s. Our aim is to propose a c…[Read more]

“Lives in Turkish” is an ongoing research project held at Boğaziçi University Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies. We trace the journey of life-writing in Turkish, collect metadata and visuals about biographical publications and biography subjects introduced to the Turkish reader since the early 1800s. Our aim is to propose a c…[Read more]

Among the numerous Jewish uṣūl al-dīn compositions in the Second Firkovitch Collection at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg there is one that I have labelled “A Hamaḏānian Patchwork”. You might just as well call it “A Persian Carpet”. It is another magnificent specimen of “diachronic intertextualities”.
The treatise, which is…[Read more]

Can the Indian manuscript and manuscript library be art? In what follows, I reflect on this question by examining a set of photographs I created for an art project called Manuscriptistan. I explain what it has meant for me to aestheticise Indian manuscript libraries and manuscripts, and I offer some insights about why it is important for scholars…[Read more]

“Selling Science in the 20th Century” was a public talk delivered as part of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Saturday Speakers series. The presentation focused on Beckman Instruments, science advertising, the Beckman Historical Collection, and the digitization component of CHF’s Beckman Legacy Project. Audience members also had the opportunity…[Read more]

When we think we know Fernando Pessoa, a new surprise arises: this time, one related to the genesis of Mensagem, the most established and celebrated book of the Pessoan canon. That book, published in 1934 with a title only finalized at the time of the typographical proofs, was initially called Portugal—an inscription dating from 1910, when P…[Read more]

This is an Urdu translation of the work “Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law and Non-Muslims”

PDF copy of the syllabus for “Mapping Violence,” an undergraduate course co-taught by Profs. Monica Muñoz Martinez and Jim McGrath with Teaching Assistant Edwin Rodriguez. The course draws on and contributes to work from Mapping Violence, a digital restorative justice initiative focused on acts of state-sanctioned racial violence in Texas and…[Read more]

Over the course of the last year the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) and the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park (Roshan Institute-UMD) have begun collaborating with the Raja of Mahmudabad family on the preservation of their important manuscript collection. The project will help protect the…[Read more]

English translation of Midhat Sertoğlu, İlk Milletlerarası Dili Bir Türk İcat Etmişti, originally published in Hayat Tarih Mecmuası 1 (1966): 66–68

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

Some notes on the history of the band, from the band’s extinct website, together with scans of two books of minutes of the old Llangollen Town Band which were discovered some years ago as part of a parcel of books in an antique shop in Yorkshire. It is not known how or when the books became “lost”, but the original books now reside safely with the…[Read more]

Given the degree of popular fascination with Gnostic religions, it is surprising how few pay attention to the one such religion that has survived from antiquity until the present day: Mandaism. Mandaeans, who esteem John the Baptist as the most famous adherent to their religion, have in our time found themselves driven from their historic…[Read more]

If Fernando Pessoa’s Portuguese works contain a coterie of heteronyms, his English poetry also displays an array of fictitious authors: besides Pessoa himself, one finds Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search and—with his poems compiled here for the first time in print—Frederick Wyatt. After Alexander Search’s presence, which dominated the English…[Read more]

Though Fernando Pessoa is not widely known as a political poet, we may be familiar with the political commentary explicit in some of his works. In four political sonnets dating from 1905 (but only fully published in 1995), the poet criticizes the mockery of Russia by British journalists, calls the colonization of Ireland and the Transvaal “a s…[Read more]

O livro Fernando Pessoa—The Poet With Many Faces, de autoria de Hubert D. Jennings, é a primeira biografia pessoana em Inglês. Originalmente escrito na década de 1970, o livro deveria ter sido impresso em 1974, mas a Revolução dos Cravos interrompeu os planos editoriais. O dactiloscrito, encontrado numa garagem em Joanesburgo, na África do Sul,…[Read more]

Review of “René d’Harnoncourt and the Art of Installation” By Michelle Elligott. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018. 176 pp. Hardcover. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-63345-050-9.

A period of six months (Dec. 2017 to Jun. 2018) saw the launch of three digital platforms dedicated to the works of Fernando Pessoa, raising the number of such projects to seven published in a decade. Considering this virtual proliferation as a milestone for Pessoan studies, this article aims to reconstruct, at least as a sketch, the history of…[Read more]