Scholarly Correspondence: The Case of Oriental Studies During the Late 19th and Early 20th Century

The history of “Oriental studies” especially during in the late modern period is still a largely neglected field. This gap is astonishing, given the vibrant scholarship on the “Science of Judaism” (“Wissenschaft des Judentums”) during the same period, a field that in many ways closely intersects with “Oriental studies”, an umbrella term for Arabic and Islamic studies, Semitic studies, and cognate fields. Acknowledgement that the discipline’s history during the late modern period constitutes an important and legitimate part of cultural history, which can and should be studied in its own right, is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it is remarkable that some of path-breaking studies in recent years were written by cultural historians rather than by scholars trained in the field. The scholars involved in “Oriental studies” during the late modern period—European scholars for the most part but also those who were based outside of Europe (Russia, the US, and of course the Middle East and India)—constituted a veritable Republic of Letters. The material that has come down to us is voluminous. The lecture will discuss the potential of the by far richest source genre for the history of “Oriental studies”, namely epistolary exchanges.

Scholarly Correspondences Among Orientalists during the Early and Late Modern Period as a Historical Source: A Series of Lectures. The object of this lecture series is to bring together scholars and librarians engaged with collections of correspondences and/or include related projects that use appropriate digital tools to map and analyze such corpora. It is hosted by Sabine Schmidtke (NES@IAS) and María Mercedes Tuya (Digital Scholarship@IAS). For additional information on this event and the lecture series visit: https://albert.ias.edu/20.500.12111/8044.