Lecture Series on the History and Culture of Central Asia (Summer Term 2024)Mā warāʾ al-Nahr According to Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldānA lecture by Kurt Franz, Universität Hamburg

2 July 2024

Photo: © E.Sinani

We are pleased to invite you to this term's third lecture of the series on the history and culture of the Zerafshan valley,  jointly organized by Prof. Dr. Stefan Heidemann, Department of Islamic Studies at the Asien-Afrika-Institut (Universität Hamburg), and Dr. Shovosil Ziyodov, director of İmam Bukhari International Scientific Research Center in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

The lecture will be held from Prof. Dr. Kurt Franz, research associate at the Center for Advanced Study “RomanIslam – Center for Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies, Universität Hamburg

• Subject: Mā warāʾ al-Nahr According to Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān
• Date: July 2nd, 2024, 13:00 CET
  
• Place: online via ZOOM

Profile of the lecturer:

An historian of society, politics, and scholarship in the lands of Islam between 600 and 1600, I ask how human experience has initially transformed into texts and thence into the intertextual literary transmission of knowledge. My research interests notably lie with the history of Arabic chronical and geographical writing, slavery and the social division of labour, socio-religious rebel movements, nomadism and the Bedouin, communication and traffic networks, and Digital Humanities. Looking ever more into the geo-spatial dynamism of Islamic history, I seek to understand the ways in which man’s spatial environments, human agency, and geographically related literature have acted upon each other. I thus also explore the encounter of spatial history, historic concepts of geo-space—both learned and popular—and cartographic visualization by introducing the method of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for historical Islamic Studies.

Having studied Arabic and Islam, Sociology, Political Science, Mediaeval and Modern History, and Semitic Languages at Göttingen, I earned my PhD from Hamburg university. I next conducted research at the university of Halle and the Orient-Institut Beirut and taught Arabic and Islam at Göttingen, Hamburg, Halle, and Kiel as well as at summer schools in Jerusalem. In the framework of the German Universities Excellence Initiative, I then accepted a professorship in Islamic Studies at Tübingen university (to 2021). Monographs of mine focus on ‘Compilation in Arabic Chronicles’ and ‘Bedouin Groups in the Islamic Middle Period’, vol. I (both in German), and I am about to conclude the first GIS-based historical atlas on the Islamic Middle East. Editorial work comprises a volume, co-edited with Wolfgang Holzwarth, on ‘Nomad Military Power in Iran and Adjacent Areas in the Islamic Period’.

Select Publications:

Franz, Kurt (2021a), “The Divine in Yāqūt’s Lexicon of Peopled Places: A Reduction”, in: Christoph Mauntel, ed., Geography and Religious Knowledge in the Medieval World (Das Mittelalter. Beihefte 14), Berlin: De Gruyter, 109–139.

Franz, Kurt (2021b), “Franciscus ignotus: Zur zeitgenössischen orientalischen Schau des Kreuzzuges gegen Damietta”, in: Amir Dziri / Angelica Hilsebein / Mouhanad Khorchide / Bernd Schmies, eds., Der Sultan und der Heilige: Islamisch-christliche Perspektiven auf die Begegnung des hl. Franziskus mit Sultan al-Kamil (1219–2019), Münster: Aschendorff, 279–333.

Franz, Kurt (2017), “Slavery in Islam: Legal Norms and Social Practice”, in: Reuven Amitai / Christoph Cluse, eds., Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000–1500 CE) (Brill’s Inner Asian Library 31), Turnhout: Brepols, 51–141.

In order to participate, please click here or use the following Zoom credentials:
Meeting ID: 525 843 6902
Password: 12345

For the poster of the lecture in full size, click here!
For more information about the joint Lecture Series on the History and Culture of Central Asia, please see here.