About me
email: ksalib [at] uchicago.edu
department: Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
primary interests: Arabic and Persian Langauge and Literature
Welcome! Khush Âmadid! I've just finished revising my site in a way that I'm pretty happy with, and it should be easily expanded as I undertake new projects. I still need to flesh out my links page and some other things, but here is the basic skeleton.
I do lots of stuff, but this site is primarily devoted to my "professional" (can I say that yet?) life as a student at the University of Chicago. My main interest is the history and literature of the Islamic cultural sphere, what Marshall Hodgson memorably calls 'Islamdom,' and I am specializing in Arabic and Persian. I’m also hoping to learn some Urdu and Turkish in the future, but these may forever be passive skills unless I can somehow expand my brain. I have also studied French and Italian and hope to keep these languages up as actively as I can to use them as a kind of foil to what I’m doing in Egypt and Iran.
I really like translation, analysis, literary history, other kinds of history, religious studies, and music. My main focus is the modern period, but my interest extends back to the turn of the millennium (common era) with the poetry of Firdusi and Nezami on one hand and the troubadours and Petrarch on the other. To give an idea of what I do, here is a list of some of the projects I’m currently working on:
- A collection of stories by the Iranian author Bozorg Alavi.
- An analysis of the development of the Joseph story from the Qur’an and Bible on the part of different contemporary writers in Persian and Arabic. (This analysis could be expanded to look at retellings of other scriptural stores—Nazif al-Hajar for example, by Ibrahim al-Koni, is a very neat retelling of the story of Cain and Abel with a new attention to the relationship between man and his environment).
- A paper looking at how ‘love’ translated into ‘loyalty’ and became a vehicle for political discourse throughout the Near Eastern and Mediterranean milieu of 1200CE.