Book launch: Reconfiguring literary traditions

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 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 author

Claire Gallien started her career in 2011 as lecturer at the English Faculty of the University of Montpellier 3, France, until 2021. She received her professor habilitation from the University of Sorbonne Nouvelle in 2023 and is currently senior research fellow at Cambridge Muslim College as well as affiliated lecturer at the Faculty of Divinity, at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining both institutions, she was research and teaching fellow at the Zentrum für Islamische Theologie (Tübingen University) where she started her second PhD on the genre of tartīb al-‘ulūm (classification of the sciences) in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Islamic world and the question of epistemic holism in Islam.

Her research interests cover British early-modern orientalism, with a focus on the constitution of Islamic manuscript libraries in early-modern Britain, Islamic epistemology and theology, Islamic literature and Sufism, decolonial thinking and translation. Her latest book 'Reconfiguring and Appropriating Arabic, Persian, and Indic Literary Traditions in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain. Orientalism and the Recreation of the Islamicate Canon' was published by Oxford University Press (May 2025).

Gallien’s work can be sampled via her academia.edu page.

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).