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Zayde Antrim is Professor of History and International Studies at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) and currently Patricia Crone Member in Near Eastern and Islamic Studies at the IAS. She is the author of Routes and Realms: The Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Mapping the Middle East (Reaktion Books, 2018) and co-editor of Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists, the only open-access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the medieval Middle East.
In this talk I will present some of the pre-1700 manuscript material I am working with for my new book project, Eroticism and Embodiment in Arabic Middle Literature: The 1001 Nights and Beyond. One of my overarching arguments in the book is that gender difference is de-emphasized in erotic episodes. This can be seen both in written descriptions of embodied beauty and in the images included in a few of the manuscripts under study. This talk will explore how we might read text and image, both together and separately, to understand the close relationship between embodied sameness and eroticism in the 1001 Nights and related works.
- Department of Near Eastern Studies
- Near Eastern Studies Program