Thursday, April 13th
9- 9:30 Coffee and bagels
9:30–10:50 Language in cultural transformation 1:
Chair: Na’ama Rokem
Marilyn Booth (Oxford University): From mademoiselle to ‘the unbored pearl’: Sexuality, authenticity, and the ‘problem’ of women’s voices in language reform.
Walid Saleh (University of Toronto): A New Religious Language: The Salafi stripping of the language of prophetic charisma
11-12:20 Language in cultural transformation 2:
Chair: Ghenwa Hayek
Aidan Kaplan (University of Chicago): Performing the Social Construction of Language in al-Shidyaq’s al-Sāq ʿalā al-Sāq
Itamar Francez (University of Chicago) A Mouth that Sounds all the Notes: sound and regeneration in Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Hebrew revivalism.
12:30 -1:30 Lunch
1:30 – 2:50 Language and national identity formation
Chair: Ahmed El Shamsy
Olga Verlato (NYU): The Precolonial History of Arabization in Egypt, 1860s-1882
Dyala Hamzah (Université de Montréal) Early Arab Nationalist Textbooks : A crucible for Modern Times
3 – 4:20 Modernization, standards and vernaculars
Chair: Hoda El Shakry
Annie Green (University of Chicago) , Beyond Fuṣḥa in the Iraqi Nahḍa: Arabic Languages and Plurilingualism
Benjamin Koerber (Rutgers): Becoming barbarī, Becoming Bourgeois: The Judeo-Arabic Vernacular Turn in Nineteenth-Century Tunisia”
5 – 6:30 Plenary: Dima Ayoub (Middlebury College)
Chair: Orit Bashkin
The Paratextual Life of Translation
Friday, April 14th
9-9:30 Coffee and bagels
9:30–10:50 Language purification
Chair: Marilyn Booth
Stafanos Katzikas (University of Chicago): Language, Nationalism and Toponym: Name Cleansing in Modern Greece
Esra Tasdelen (University of Chicago): Language as a tool of Turkism: Ahmet Hikmet Müftüoğlu’s thoughts on the Turkish Language and its role in the project of nation building
11-12:20 Empire, linguistic reform and the language sciences I
Chair: Esra Tasdelen
Elena Simonato (university of Lausanne) Modernizing vernacular idioms : a Soviet experiment
Usman Ahmedani (University of Amsterdam) ‘Bir lisan-ı vâhid’: Debating Linguistic Kinship in the Late Ottoman Empire
12:30 -1:30 Lunch
1:30-3:00 Empire, linguistic reform and the language sciences II
Chair: Itamar Francez
İlker Aytürk and Emmanuel Szurek (Bilkent University / University of Amsterdam ) Metalinguistic Status Anxiety: Turkish between European Imperialism and Turkish Supremacism. (on Zoom)
Michiel Leezenberg (University of Amsterdam): The Rise of Vernacular Philologies in the Ottoman Empire: An Interconnected History
3:30-5 Plenary: Johann Strauss (University of Strasbourg)
Chair: Holly Shissler
Purism and the quest for modernity