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Practices of Commentary

Elisabeth HOLLENDER

Goethe University Frankfurt

Elisabeth Hollender is Professor of Jewish Studies at the Department of Jewish Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is a specialist on medieval Jewish culture in Ashkenaz with a focus on liturgical poetry and exegesis, including commentaries on liturgical poetry. After her first book Qedushta’ot des Simon b. Isaak nach dem Amsterdam Mahsor. Übersetzung und Kommentar on liturgical poetry from Mainz, she published widely on piyyut commentary, including Clavis Commentariorum of Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in Manuscript and Piyyut Commentary in Medieval Ashkenaz.

Walker HORSFALL

University of Toronto

Walker Horsfall is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the interaction between medieval German literature and contemporary scientific materials. His dissertation project analyzes the poetry of the Middle High German poet Heinrich von Meissen, better known as Frauenlob, for its integration of natural philosophy into poetic form.

Murat Umut INAN

University of Toronto

Murat Umut Inan is a sessional lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on multilingual literary, cultural and intellectual production in the Ottoman world, with an emphasis on the flow and interaction of people, texts and ideas in a region extending from the Balkans through Anatolia into Iran and the Arab lands. He is completing a book on the reception of the Persian language and classics in the making of an imperial language, culture and scholarship in late medieval and early modern Ottoman lands, 1400–1600.

Project Launch, 21 August 2020

It’s our pleasure to invite you to the official zoom launch of the 5-year SSHRC Insight Grant, “Practices of Commentary,” hosted through the University of Toronto, and gathering colleagues from around the world.

The launch will take place on Friday, August 21, 2020 at

9am-10:30am EST (Toronto) | 3-4:30pm CEST (Germany) | 9-10:30pm SST (Singapore)

At the launch, we will introduce our plans for this first year, particularly in this time of COVID-19, as well as our longer-term goals. There will also be opportunity for discussion and introductions, as well as a short primer on Slack, our community’s digital home, and an introduction to our new project website.

Please reach out to us through the “Contact” emails to find out more.

Background image: British Library. Egerton MS 872, fol. 199r. Pentateuch with the Hafṭarot, Five Scrolls, and Rashi’s commentary, 1341.Source: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Egerton_MS_872

Seyfeddin KARA

University of Toronto

I am Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellow at The University of Toronto, mentored by Prof Walid Saleh. I was awarded a PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Durham in 2015. I have published research articles in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Muslim World and Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. My first book In Search of Ali ibn Abi Talib’s Codex: History and Traditions of the Earliest Copy of the Qur’an, was published in 2018. I am currently writing my second monograph on the Textual integrity of the Qur’an. I am specialised in the isnad-cum-matn method and am interested in working with Sunni/Shiʿi sources.

Matthew L. KEEGAN

Barnard College, Columbia University

Matthew L. Keegan is the Moinian Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College. His research focuseson Islamic intellectual history and adab (usually translated as “literature” or “belles-lettres”). He has written on Islamic legal riddles, and he is currently writing a monograph about the commentaries on al-Hariri’s Maqamat, a 12th-century collection of stories about an eloquent trickster who uses his wits and his mastery of language to dupe his audiences. He received his PhD from NYU, taught at the American University of Sharjah, and completed a postdoc at the Freie Universität Berlin.

Christina LECHTERMANN

Ruhr University of Bochum

Currently, my interest is focused on two different subject areas: a) technical literature of the Early Modern Period and above all 16^th century printed books that present skills and knowledge in constructive geometry, and b) vernacular legends and poetry praising the virgin Mary, above all ‘Gloss Songs’ (Glossenlieder), ‘Marienpsalter’ and narratives presenting the life of the virgin.

Bill M. MAK

Needham Research Institute, Cambridge / Robinson College, Cambridge University

Bill M. Mak is Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, and is affiliated with the Robinson College, Cambridge University. His research focuses on the early Indian astral science from the perspective of history of science and knowledge production/circulation in Eurasia during the first millennium CE. He examines the formation and dissemination of early Indian astral texts such as the Gārgīyajyotisha and the Yavana (“Greco-Indian”) texts in India, as well as their reception and transformation in East and Southeast Asia.

Nico MARA-MCKAY

University of Toronto

Nico Mara-McKay (they/them) is a History PhD student at the University of Toronto. Nico received their MA in History from the University of Guelph and their BA in History and Art History from the University of Toronto. They have been involved in curating in several exhibitions, including Illuminating Life: Manuscript Pages of the Middle Ages (Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph, Guelph, 2020) and Between (Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga) and was the sole curator for Genderqueer in Canada (The ArQuives, Toronto, 2020). Nico’s research focuses on gender and sexuality in late medieval western Europe.

Katie MENENDEZ

University of Toronto

Katie Menendez is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Latin biblical commentaries, historiography, the transmission and reception of texts in monasteries, time, and manuscript studies. Her dissertation examines texts copied and written at Durham Cathedral, England, around 1100 to investigate the monks’ perception of time and how they used and shaped the intellectual traditions available to them.

Jeannie MILLER

University of Toronto

Jeannie Miller is Associate Professor of classical Arabic literature in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at University of Toronto. Her first book, The Quibbler: Al-Jāḥiẓ’s Equivocations, reads the signature style and voice of the canonical Arabic author al-Jahiz (d. 868–9 CE) through the theoretical framework of his ideas about knowledge that is not absolute, but rather probable, partial, or otherwise incomplete. She is now working on an edition of a portion of al-Jahiz’s Book of Animals (Kitāb al-Ḥāyawān) based on new manuscript evidence, and a reception history of al-Jahiz’s work.

Florian MUELLER

University of Toronto

For my dissertation, I am working on the German ‘Heldenbuch’ (Book of Heroes) prints and their manuscript predecessors from the 15^th and 16^th centuries. They continue a literary tradition that has its earliest roots in oral storytelling from the Early Middle Ages, and these roots are reflected both in the archaic form and the contents of the ‘Heldenbuch’ texts. In consequence, they provide rich material for questions concerning transmission and canon formation, the dissemination of printed literature in Early Modern Germany, the aesthetics of reception, and the materiality of texts.

On-cho NG

The Pennsylvania State University

I am Professor of History, Asian Studies, and Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University. Primarily a specialist in late imperial Chinese intellectual history, I have published extensively on a wide range of topics, such as Confucian hermeneutics, religiosity, ethics, and historiography. My books include Cheng-Zhu Confucianism in the Early Qing, and Mirroring the Past. His dozens of articles have appeared in major outlets such as Dao, Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of World History, and the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Christine OTT

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Christine Ott studied French, Italian and German Studies at the Universities of Eichstätt and St.-Étienne. She obtained her PhD in 2002 with a dissertation in Italian Literature on Reflections on language in the poetry of Eugenio Montale. She has been Research Fellow at the universities of Eichstätt, Heidelberg and Marburg and is Professor for Italian and French Literature at the Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt since 2011. Her main research areas are poetry (20^th century and early modern), the relationship between literature and art, Food/Corporeality Studies and commentary.

Matthieu RÉAL

Cornell University

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Cornell University. My dissertation, Understanding the poets: Greek Literary Exegesis from the Sixth to the Fourth Centuries BCE, studies how ancient readers read, interpreted, and discussed poetry. My interests include Greek and Latin poetry (Homer in particular), ancient scholarship, ancient biographies, and the history of ancient Aristotelianism. Before joining Cornell, I was a student at the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori and I received my BA and MA in Classics from the Università degli Studi di Padova (Italy).

Helmut REIMITZ

History Department & Director of the Program in Medieval Studies, Princeton University

I study late Antique and early Medieval History and have been teaching at Princeton since 2008. Before that I was the head of the early medieval department at the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. My research focuses on the formation of some of the distinctive features of Western civilization such as the creation of a specific conception of ethnicity, the politics of identity, the history of historical thinking, and on law and legal pluralism in the late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

E. Natalie Rothman

Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC), Graduate Department of History, Program in Book History and Print Culture, University of Toronto

E. Natalie Rothman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC. She is interested in the history of Venetian-Ottoman cultural mediation in the early modern period, diplomatic translation and translators, the genealogies of Orientalism, the history of archives, and digital scholarship. She is the author of Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011) and the forthcoming book and digital project, The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism.

Princeton Arabic mss Garrett no. 2271Y

by Walid SALEH

I was not going to the USA to study Qur’an commentary tradition. That was not the plan. I came to graduate school to study the Qur’an, in the manner of Biblical Studies (higher criticism). There I was reading up on scholarship on the Qur’an. I read a book on folklore and the Qur’an, and in it the author mentions that one of the most important Qur’an commentaries in Islamic history is still unedited!!!!!!! I said WHAT!!!!! This was 1994. A moment that would define my academic career, a side remark by an author.

Tony SCOTT

University of Toronto

Tony focuses on the intersection of Pali literature, contemplative practice, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Southeast Asia. To capture both the substance and context of these interconnections, his sources range from classical Pali exegeses, mid-twentieth-century newspapers, biographies of monks and nuns, government documents, meditation manuals, palm-leaf manuscripts, and stelae collections of scripture. These sources act as a vector for Tony’s philological method informed by vernacular paradigms, but also a critical historiography of texts, practices, and attainments that seeks to uncover how these different spheres influence and support each other in the formation of textual communities and Buddhist polities.

Markus STOCK

University of Toronto, Dept. of Germanic Languages and Literatures/Centre for Medieval Studies

My research is situated in medieval German literature and culture, with a focus on twelfth- and thirteenth-century epic and romance as well as medieval love poetry. It has been funded by SSHRC, the Humboldt Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Foundation (DAAD).

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