UCLA has the second-largest holding of Arabic-script manuscripts in the Americas, including what may be the region's largest collections of Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts. These treasures belong to at least twenty different collections that came to UCLA at various times and under different circumstances. As we seek to expand and enhance access to these materials through the Islamic Manuscript Initiative of UCLA Library Special Collections, we face the issue that the provenance of many of the collections is not well established. With the generous support of the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies, the UCLA Islamic Studies Program, the UCLA Center for Early Global Studies, UCLA Library Special Collections, and Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History, this event will draw attention to manuscript provenance by hosting five talks from scholars working in this field, most of whom will speak directly about the UCLA collections. The event will conclude with a collaborative research session in which a group of scholars from UCLA and beyond spends a few hours together poring over one of the less-well-known collections in an effort to shed light on its background and provenance.
Speakers and Talk Titles:
Nir Shafir (UCSD)
Searching in pamphlets, ephemera, and other fossils in the strata of the Islamic manuscript archive
Shafir, is a historian of the Middle East, in particular, the Ottoman Empire, between 1400-1800. His research focuses on the histories of communication, religion, and science and technology. Shafir’s first book,
The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire, provides a unique and comprehensive description of the world of books, reading, and education in the early modern Ottoman Empire, detailing how “pamphlets” fractured this world by exacerbating the virulent and vicious socio-religious debates that polarized Ottoman society in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Garret Davidson (College of Charleston)
The Syrian bookseller Rashīd al Hawāṣilī (d. 1952) and the Dispersion of Two Late-Ottoman Libraries
Davidson, is an associate professor of Arabic and Muslim World studies at the College of Charleston. His research examines the Islamic scholarly tradition, Arabic manuscript culture and provenance history. He has held fellowships at Princeton, Yale, the Institute for Advanced Study and the Chester Beatty Museum. Davidson is currently working on a monograph examining the recently discovered papers of Muḥammad Amīn al-Khānjī (d. 1939) and his role in the Islamic manuscript trade in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kathryn Babayan (University of Michigan)
The Isfahan Archive Project
Babayan, is a professor of History and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. Babayan is a social and cultural historian of the early-modern Persianate world with a particular focus on gender studies, and the history of sexuality. She is a recipient of the 2024-25 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for her current project, entitled The Persian Anthology: Reading with the Margins, which is a gendered history of reading practices in early modern Isfahan. Her most recent book, The City as Anthology: Urbanity and Eroticism in Early Modern Isfahan (SUP, 2021), offers a model to study early modern urban culture through anthologies collected in Isfahan’s households.
Khalil Afzali
Provenance of Arabic-Script Manuscripts in the Caro Minasian Collection
Alfazi, is an Islamic Manuscripts Cataloging Assistant (IMCA) at the UCLA Library Special Collections. He is the founder of the Baysunghur Research Institute in Afghanistan, which focuses on the study and preservation of the literary, cultural, and historical heritage of Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iran. In his research and teaching Afzali focuses on codicology, Sufism, literary history, and Bidel studies. He has published two books and more than 30 papers in Persian both in Iran and Afghanistan. He is also the chief editor of Nama-ye Baysunghur annual journal, which features work on Persian literature, art, and history.
Taha Tuna Kaya
Turkish Manuscripts at UCLA: Past, Present, and Future
Kaya, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Turkish Teaching at Sivas Cumhuriyet University, Turkey and a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on Turkish manuscripts, classical poetry, and oral folk traditions. For his Ph.D. dissertation, he examined more than 100 manuscripts, collecting and analyzing the poems of Virani (17th century) from sources such as diwans, majmuas, and cönks. He has been working on identifying and cataloging Turkish manuscripts at UCLA for two years. Beyond manuscript studies, Dr. Kaya has contributed extensively to the field of folklore and literature through numerous publications, edited volumes, and international research projects. Most recently, he authored the Encyclopedia of Turkic Epics and Folk Tales, a monumental 9-volume, 4,000-page reference work documenting oral narratives across the Turkic world. His academic career includes teaching and research appointments in Turkey, Estonia, France, Serbia, and the United States, reflecting his commitment to advancing global scholarship on Turkish language and culture.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Islamic Studies, UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History