The Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC cordially invites you to the following talks and meetings in conjunction with our search for an Assistant Professor, Late Antiquity and/or Early Islam:
***Events are open to all UofT faculty, staff, and students. RSVP encouraged***
Ms. Valentina Grasso
Ms. Valentina Grasso is currently a final-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, where she is studying the history of late antique pre-Islamic Arabia under the supervision of Professor Garth Fowden. She is also a 2020-21 Shatzmiller Fellow at the North Carolina Jewish Studies Seminar (Duke University) and a member of two archaeological projects (the Madaba Plan Project and the Southern Red Sea Archaeological Histories Project). After Classical Studies in high school, she pursued a degree in Semitic Philology at the University of Catania and studied Imperial Aramaic and Classical Arabic, graduating in 2015 (110/110 cum laude). During her M.A. in “Oriental Languages and Cultures” (2017, 110/110 cum laude) at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” she continued to study both Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew. She spent her last M.A. year as an Erasmus student at SOAS, University of London. During her studies, she has also attended courses sponsored by the University of Oxford, Princeton University, HMML/Dumbarton Oaks and Hamburg University. Her research interest include the late antique world, with special reference to the history of the Arabian Peninsula and Ethiopia during the first millennium CE. Over the last three years, she has taught two courses at the University of Cambridge, has attended/organised twenty-five conferences, has published several academic articles, and has received eighteen grants and awards.
Teaching talk: “Pagan and Scripturalist Antecedents of Islam in the Ḥijāz”.
Monday, March 8th, 2021 10:00am-12:00pm on Zoom
Research talk: “Politics, Cults and Communal Identities in Late Antique South Arabia and Aksūm”
Tuesday, March 9th, 2021, 2:00pm-4:00pm on Zoom
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Dr. Suleyman Dost
Dr. Suleyman Dost is an Assistant Professor in the Near East and Judaic Studies Department at Brandeis University and currently holds a research fellowship at ANAMED Research Center at Koç University, Turkey. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2017. Dr. Dost’s research and teaching interests include history of late antique Arabia and Ethiopia, pre-Islamic Arabian epigraphy and Qur’anic Studies. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the historical, religious and linguistic context of the Qur’an’s origins through a study of pre-Islamic inscriptions from the Arabian peninsula.
Teaching talk: “Early Muslim Conquests in Light of Material Evidence: A Close-Looking Exercise with Four Objects”
Wednesday, March 10th, 2021, 10:00am-12:00pm on Zoom
Research talk: "Call upon Allāh or al-Raḥmān”: The Politics of Naming God in Late Antique Arabia
Thursday, March 11th, 2021, 9:00am-11:00am on Zoom