The Cowpastures emerged as a regional concept in the late 18th century, starting with the story of the cattle of the First Fleet that escaped their captivity at the Sydney settlement. The region was a culturally constructed landscape that ebbed and flowed with European activity. It grew around the government reserve established by Governors…[Read more]

This presentation was an overview of an ongoing project on how material culture across the Macarthur region of NSW is a store of collective memories of early colonial New South Wales and the Cowpastures region from 1795 to 1840. There are monuments, memorials, murals, and other items of material culture that prompt collective memories and tell…[Read more]

Early European settlers were the key actors in a place-making exercise that constructed an English-style landscape aesthetic on the colonial stage in the Cowpastures district of New South Wales. The aesthetic became part of the settler colonial project and the settlers’ aim of taking possession of territory involved the construction of a c…[Read more]

This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

This working paper presents in full translation four texts of the Uzbek early 20th-century jadid reformist Abdurrauf Fitrat. Identifying educational reform as the main key to progress, he advocated for the emancipation and nationalisation of the Chaghatay/Uzbek language as a tool to educate the masses rather than to serve the interests of a…[Read more]

The Mandaean proselyte Meryay, best known from her representations in the Canonical Prayerbook, the Great Treasure (Genzā Rabbā), and the Book of John (Drāši d-Yaḥyā), serves as an illuminating example of the sort of figure who partially and ambiguously bridges the interests and concerns of differently constituted religious communities, allowi…[Read more]

Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important, if…[Read more]

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

This working paper presents a 16th- or 17th-century Ottoman translation-cum-commentary of the preface and introduction of one of the classics of Islamicate rhetoric, al-Qazwīnī’s Talkhīṣ al-Miftāḥ (The Key’s Digest), a 14th-century work on rhetoric based on al-Sakkākī’s 13th-century seminal Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm (The Key of Sciences). This part…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cam…[Read more]

Urdu literature saw a “Reform boom” in the second half of nineteenth century. Most of the literati were engaged in understanding, and presenting their views on, the rapidly changing world around them. This article analyses a text produced in 1893 by Shad Azeemabadi, enhancing the need for reform in the Zenana. By underscoring the relationship of…[Read more]

Nazir Ahmad, often considered to be the first Urdu novelist, used narratives for understanding the quickly changing world around him, and in his work, shaped expanding possibilities and new roles for Muslim ashrāf women. Although he is usually thought of as a cleric who had a traditional approach towards society and new forms of knowledge, in…[Read more]

This article explores the normalization of Ashraf Culture and Colonizers in Majalis un-Nisa. It is argued that the colonial authorities tried at their capacity to keep themselves at length from the colonized physically and disseminated the discourse of colonial difference to present themselves as role models symbolically. While preparing the…[Read more]

Identity is the construction of the cultural process of a people, i.e. the social milieu in turn defines and shapes humans into the kinds of individuals they are. This shaping of identity is carried further and represented through the literature of a culture as well. It is the characters which come to stand for certain traits and the kinds of…[Read more]

To determine the social status of a person, Sorokin coined the idea of social space. This theme is useful in analyzing the relative position of a person in her/his group and her/his horizontal or vertical movement within and to other groups. Novel is a symbolic space, which makes possible for writers to construct the relative social status of…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]

The translation of a short treatise on paranomasia, simile, and metonymy, by the foremost Persian-Turkish lexicographer of the 15th century, Lütfu’llāh el–Ḥalīmī. The text combines a rather dense and elliptic prose style with a remarkably lucid and clear-cut typology of seven types of tajnīs, seven types of tashbīh, and nine types of majāz, ofte…[Read more]