’his Pen and Ink Are a Powerful Mirror’: Andalusi, Judaeo-Arabic, and Other Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Ross Brann

’His Pen and Ink are a Powerful Mirror’ is a volume of collected essays in honor of Ross Brann, written by his students and friends on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The essays engage with a diverse range of Andalusi and Mediterranean literature, art, and history. Each essay begins from the organic hybridity of Andalusi literary and cultural history as its point of departure, introduce new texts, ideas, and objects into the disciplinary conversation or radically reassesses well-known ones, and represent the theoretical, methodological, and material impacts Brann has had and continues to have on the study of the literature and culture of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in al-Andalus.

Contributors include: Ali Humayn Akhtar, Esperanza Alfonso, Peter Cole, Jonathan Decter, Elisabeth Hollender, Uriah Kfir, S.J. Pearce, F.E. Peters, Arturo Prats, Cynthia Robinson, Tova Rosen, Aurora Salvatierra, Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jessica Streit, David Torollo.

Adam Bursi, Ph.D. (2015), Cornell University, is a post-doctoral research fellow at Utrecht University in the ERC research project SENSIS: The Senses of Islam. His research studies early Islam in dialogue with other late antique religions, focusing on the ways that rituals related to relics, pilgrimage, and healing were tightly interwoven with the formation and performance of communal membership among early Muslims. He has previously held positions as a fellow at the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee and as a cataloguer of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University.

S.J. Pearce, Ph.D. (2011), Cornell University, is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She has published articles on various aspects of medieval Andalusi literature and cultural history and is the author of The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington, 2017), which is the recipient of the 2019 La Corónica International Book Prize. She has held research fellowships at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.

Hamza Zafer, Ph.D. (2013), Cornell University, is an assistant professor of Late Antique Judaism and Early Islam in the department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Washington. His work focuses on the development of narrative traditions in the Qur’ān and other early Islamic sources, as well as upon early relationships between Arabian Muslim and Jewish communities. He teaches panoramic courses on major themes in religious studies such as concepts of prophecy across cultures, and evil and the nature of the devil, as well as more focused, text-based classes for advanced students.