The conference brings together scholars from various regions and disciplines (including Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Sanskrit, as well as European languages) to explore the personal (and especially self-reflective) dimensions of academic knowledge production by studying scholars (i.e., producers) and their contexts (i.e., institutions and societies) in relation to their objects of study. The conference outlines an avenue of research dedicated to the study of tensions, antagonisms and polemics - as well as fascination, cooperation, appropriation and friendship - that transpired as a consequence of the meetings of different scholars and their dissimilar modes of textual scholarship, made possible through international cooperation in the form of conferences, journals, academic associations and student exchange.

Argument

The research program Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin) and the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS), in cooperation with Leiden University Library, organize a joint international conference which will take place at the University of Leiden, 4-5 June 2014. The event is funded by the LUCIS, the Center for International Cooperation, FU Berlin, the CNRS Paris and Utrecht University.

As a result of colonial expansion and the technologies that made long-distance communication and travel possible, the 19th and 20th centuries witnessed an accelerated rate of individual interactions across the globe, including scholarly encounters. Individual scholars became more conscious of the commonalities that they shared with fellow humans all over the world, which they expressed in universalistic projects in philosophy, philology, the life sciences and other fields of human inquiry. Yet the encounter also brought about an articulation of differences.  Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Philological Encounters is a conference dedicated to exploring the personal (and especially self-reflective) dimensions of academic knowledge production by studying scholars (i.e., producers) and their contexts (i.e., institutions and societies) in relation to their objects of study.

Knowledge is always embedded in institutions and is produced by individual scholars whose choices are shaped by their biographies as much as by the subjects they study.  Thus, Philological Encounters refers to the discovery of difference that came about due to the real-life encounters between professionals and interpreters of texts, languages and cultures across the globe. This conference outlines an avenue of research dedicated to the study of tensions, antagonisms and polemics – as well as fascination, cooperation, appropriation and friendship – that transpired as a consequence of the meetings of different scholars and their dissimilar modes of textual scholarship, made possible through international cooperation in the form of conferences, journals, academic associations and student exchange.
The conference objective is not hagiography, but rather historicizing seemingly monolithic categories – such as 'orientalism', 'philology' and 'history' – by localizing the role of individual actors in the process of knowledge formation, in the colonial and post-colonial periods. The conference addresses this by looking at first-person accounts of conferences, reports, travel writing, correspondences, memoirs, auto/biographies, polemical essays, and translations, among other writings.

Convened by Islam Dayeh (Zukunftsphilologie/Freie Universität Berlin), Umar Ryad (Utrecht University) and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (CNRS Paris)

Schedule

Wednesday, 4 June 2014

Venue: Main conference room (Universiteitsbibliotheek, Witte Singel 27)

09.45 – 10.15 Introduction

• Islam Dayeh, Umar Ryad and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn
• Leon Buskens (LUCIS – Director)
• Arnold Vrolijk (Library of the University of Leiden – Curator of Oriental Manuscripts and Rare Books)

Chair: Umar Ryad (Utrecht University)

• 10.15 – 11.00 Albert de Jong (Leiden Institute for Religious Studies), Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1837-1918) and his Zoroastrian Catechism
• 11.00 – 11.45 Mishka Sinha (Zukunftsphilologie Fellow 2013-2014, Berlin), "And shall all these die for me and mine?" A new Ethics for the Gita: Josiah Royce, Indic Philology and Post-Kantian Idealism in the United States, 1876-1916

11.45 – 12.00 Coffee Break

Chair: Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (CNRS Paris)

• 12.00 – 12.45 Thibaut d’Hubert (Zukunftsphilologie Fellow 2013-2014, Berlin/University of Chicago), John Murray, ‘a Highland Chieftain elevated by Oriental Ideas’
• 12.45 – 13.30 Sarath Jakka (University of Porto/University of Kent), Philological/Pedagogical Encounters: Charles Philip Brown and his Encounter with the Telugu Language

13.30 – 14.45 Lunch

Chair: Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (CNRS Paris)

• 14.45 – 15.30 Andres Jimenez-Angel (Katholische Universitat Eichstatt-Ingolstadt), Correspondence, “Cultural Pilgrimage” and the Transnational Legitimation of Philological and Linguistic Knowledge in Colombia, 1876-1911
• 15.30 – 16.15 Pablo Martinez (Universidad de Buenos Aires), Unencountered Philologists: Ricardo Rojas and the Spanish Directors of the Institute of Philology at the University of Buenos Aires

16.15 – 16.30 Coffee Break

Chair: Islam Dayeh (Freie Universitat Berlin)

• 16.30 – 17.15 Ammeke Kateman (University of Amsterdam), Discussing Religion Globally. An Encounter between Muhammad ‘Abduh, Herbert Spencer and Wilfrid Blunt
• 17.15– 18.00 Dyala Hamzah (University of Montreal), History at a Crossroad. Early Arab Nationalist Narratives, American and German Orientalism and the Legacies of Islamic Historiography

Thursday, 5 June 2014

Chair: Umar Ryad (Utrecht University)

• 10.00 – 10.45 Goran Larsson (University of Gothenburg), H.S. Nyberg's Encounter with Egypt and the Mu‘tazili School of Thought
• 10.45 – 11.30 Elisabetta Benigni (University of Turin), Italian Orientalists in Cairo: The Case of Ignazio Guidi and his Son Michelangelo

11.30 – 11.45 Coffee Break

Chair: Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (CNRS Paris)

• 11.45 – 12.30 Michael Facius (Freie Universitat Berlin), Transcultural Sinology in late 19th-Century Japan. The Case of Shigeno Yasutsugu
• 12.30 – 13.15 Rico Sneller (Leiden University), Heidegger and the Japanese Notion of ‘Language’

13.15 – 14.30 Lunch

Chair: Islam Dayeh (Freie Universitat Berlin)

• 14.30 – 15.15 Sherif Hasan Ismail (New York University), Philological Encounters, Literary Reconstructions: Fāris al-Shidyāq and His Career
• 15.15 – 16.00 Herman Paul (Leiden University), Contested Visions of Oriental Studies: The Polemical Reception of Reinhart Dozy’s ‘The Israelites in Mecca’ in the 1860s

16.00 – 16.15 Coffee Break

Chair: Islam Dayeh (Freie Universitat)

• 16.15 – 17.00 Tal Hever-Chybowski (Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin), The ‘Zamlers’ Scholarly Model: Mobilizing the East-European Jewish Masses for Philological Projects

17.00 – 17.45 Concluding Discussion