Shii News – Academic Items

1. Publication – The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travel Writers

The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travel Writers (Routledge, 2015).

Presenting a critical perspective on the cultural interactions between the “East” and the “West”, this book questions the role of travel in the production of knowledge and in the construction of the idea of the Islamic city. This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, questioning the role of Western travel writing in the production of knowledge about the East, particularly focusing on the cities of the Muslim world.

Title: The City in the Muslim World: Depictions by Western Travel Writers
Editors: Mohammad Gharipour and Nilay Ozlu
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN13: 9781138842625
Number of pages: 312

Introduction 1 Mobile Urbanism: Tent Cities in Medieval Travel Writing Mohammad Gharipour and Manu Sobti 2 Understanding the City Through Traveller’s Tales: Cairo as Seen and Experienced by Two Fourteenth-Century Italians Felicity Ratte 3 Where Is the Greatest City in the East? The Mughal City of Lahore in European Travel Accounts (1556–1648) Mehreen Chida-Razvi 4 The Image of the City: Public Baths and Urban Space in Western Travellers’ Descriptions of Ottoman Sofia Stefan Peychev 5 Cultural Encounters between Europeans and Arabs: Carsten Niebuhr’s Reflections on Cities of the Islamic World (1761–1767) Jørgen Mikkelsen 6 Western Eyes on Jannina: Foreign Narratives of a City Recorded in Texts and Images (1788–1822) Renia Paxinou 7 Single P(a)lace, Multiple Narratives: The Topkapi Palace in Western Travel Accounts from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century Nilay Özlü 8 Tensions and Interactions: Muslim, Christian and Jewish Towns in Palestine Through European Travellers’ Accounts (Eighteenth–Twentieth Century) Valérie Géonet 9 In and Out of the Frame: Finnish Painters Discovering Tunisia Marie-Sophie Lundström 10 “The Orient Veneered in the Occident”: Naserid Tehran in the Eyes of European Travellers Mohammad R. Shirazi 11 No Place for a Tourist: Imagining Fez in the Burton Holmes Travelogue Michelle Craig 12 Turkey’s Challenge to the Occident: British Views of Republican Ankara Davide Deriu

2. French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire
Marseilles to Constantinople, 1650-1700
By Michele Longino
Routledge – 2015 – 180 pages
978-1-13-882265-8

Examining the history of the French experience of the Ottoman world and Turkey, this comparative study visits the accounts of early modern travelers for the insights they bring to the field of travel writing. The journals of contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean Thévenot, Laurent D’Arvieux, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, Jean Chardin, and Antoine Galland reveal a rich corpus of political, social, and cultural elements relating to the Ottoman Empire at the time, enabling an appreciation of the diverse shapes that travel narratives can take at a distinct historical juncture. Longino examines how these writers construct themselves as authors, characters, and individuals in keeping with the central human project of individuation in the early modern era, also marking the differences that define each of these travelers – the shopper, the envoy, the voyeur, the arriviste, the ethnographer, the merchant. She shows how these narratives complicate and alter political and cultural paradigms in the fields of Mediterranean studies, 17th-century French studies, and cultural studies, arguing for their importance in the canon of early modern narrative forms, and specifically travel writing. The first study to examine these travel journals and writers together, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars covering travel writing, French literature, and history.

Introduction 1. The Jeweler / Voyeur. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) 2. The Tourist / Ethnographer. Jean Thévenot (1633-1667) 3. The Arriviste / Envoy. Laurent D’Arvieux (1635-1702) 4. The Conquering Artist. Guillaume-Joseph Grelot (1638 – ?) 5. The English Frenchman.. Jean Chardin (1643-1712) 6. The Reluctant Diarist. Antoine Galland (1646-1715) Conclusion

3. Seoul National University – Assistant Professor, West Asian Studies
(Modern Iran)

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