Marina Rustow will be visiting UF on January 24 and 25.
Lecture, “The Cairo Geniza and the Lost Arabic Archives”
Tuesday, January 24, 5:30 PM, Smathers Library Judaica Suite.
Among the many unexpected finds the Cairo Geniza has yielded are hundreds—possibly thousands—of medieval documents of state in Arabic script. Among these are decrees, rescripts, petitions, tax receipts and fiscal accounts from period of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt and Syria (969–1171). Most of these Fatimid state documents were reused for Hebrew-script texts, hence their survival in the discarded manuscript chamber of a medieval Egyptian synagogue. In this talk, Professor Rustow will discuss how these documents illustrate techniques of recording and preserving records of one of more powerful and dynamic medieval Muslim dynasties and the position held by Jews in it.
Seminar, “Paper, the State, and Innovation Diffusion across the Islamicate World: A Discussion of the Technicalities of Medieval Paper Technology”
Wednesday, January 25, 11:45 AM, Keene-Flint Hall Room 5.
Please RSVP to Nina Caputo (ncaputo@ufl.edu), as lunch will be served.
Marina Rustow is Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East. Professor of Near Eastern Studies and History at Princeton University. Her first book, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) was winner of the 2008 Salo W. Baron Prize (American Academy for Jewish Research) and the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for 2007-2011 in the category of Ancient and Medieval Jewish History (Association for Jewish Studies). She is currently working on a book on Fatimid documents of state preserved in the Geniza. Rustow has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2015 she won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.