Reconfiguring and appropriating Arabic, Persian, and Indic literary traditions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain:
Orientalism and the recreation of the Islamicate Canon

Join Dr Prof habil Claire Gallien (Faculty of Divinity & Cambridge Muslim College) to learn how traditions from Islamicate regions of the world were reconfigured by British orientalists. 

This online book launch will feature responses from Majid Daneshgar and Michele Petrone.

About the respondents

Dr Majid Daneshgar is Associate Professor of Area Studies at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan, and was formerly Munby Fellow at Cambridge University Library in association with St John's College. He has been the curator of Endless Stories: Manuscripts, knowledge and translation in the 17th century dedicated to Thomas Erpenius's manuscripts. He has published his recent book entitled Reconstructing Erpenius' Library (Brill, 2024).

Michele Petrone is post-doc researcher in The European Qur’an ERC project, based in Napoli L’Orientale. He has worked on the mechanisms of textual transmission, especially of Sufi texts in the Horn of Africa. Since 2021 his research is focused on the Oriental manuscripts collections of Luigi F. Marsili (d. 1730) in Bologna, especially on the muṣḥafs and their orthoepic features. He is currently working on a monograph (De Gruyter 2025) on Marsili’s Orientalist writings as a context for his collecting islamic manuscripts. The book will also feature a catalogue of the Qur’ans of the collection.

Practicalities

This event will be held fully online. Please register to receive a calendar invitation and instructions on how to join (see link below).