Stories We Continue to Tell: The Many Returns of One Thousand and One Nights
Date February, 07 2021
Location Live Webinar on Zoom
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award and the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute organized a webinar exploring the enduring power of The Thousand and One Nights. One of the greatest contributions to world literature, The Thousand and One Nights has sparked the creativity of storytellers since the 18th century. This conversation between two winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award traced the returns and afterlives of the Nights, and discussed the impact of these tales in inspiring and shaping the stories of writers from across the world.
Speakers included:
• Richard van Leeuwen, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies, University of Amsterdam; Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arabic Culture in Other Languages (2020)
• Philip Kennedy, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Comparative Literature, NYUAD; Winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arabic Culture in Other Languages (2019)
• In conversation with Maya Kesrouany, Assistant Professor of Literature and Arab Crossroads Studies, NYUAD
The live Zoom webinar entitled ‘Stories We Continue To Tell: The Many Returns of The Thousand and One Nights’ will be held in English with simultaneous Arabic Interpretation.
Speakers
Maya Kesrouany
Assistant Professor of Literature and Arab Crossroads Studies, NYUAD. Her recent scholarship centers on twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural production from the Middle East, with a specific interest in the relationship between aesthetics and politics in literary and visual arts and the theory, practice, and impact of translation on 20th century Arab cultural thought.
Over the course of her academic career, Kesrouany has taught courses in Arabic and postcolonial literature, modern British literature and culture, the novel, literary theory in a comparative framework, and Middle Eastern studies. Kesrouany’s current research project – Conversions with No Endings: Aesthetics and Politics in the Arab World – explores visual and literary cultural transformations in Egypt and Lebanon from the 1940s until today.
Richard van Leeuwen
Richard van Leeuwen has published widely on the history of the Middle East, Arabic literature, and Islam, and is also a translator of Arabic literature. His publications include Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon (1994); Waqfs and Urban Structures (1999); The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (2004); The Thousand and One Nights: space, travel, and transformation (2007); Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300-1800 (2007); The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth Century Fiction (2018), for which he won a Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2020. He is a senior lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
Philip Kennedy
Prof. Kennedy is a British academic and researcher specialising in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. He holds a PhD in Classic Arabic Poetry and a Masters in Middle East Studies. He is the author of The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abu Nuwas and the Literary Tradition (1997), Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition (2016) and a number of other studies about Arabic Literature. He is Vice Provost for Public programming at the NYUAD Institute and the General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.