Online lecture on Arabic book culture in the 9th century

Gründler (PhD Harvard University 1995) is Professor of Arabic Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her main areas of research are Arabic script, classical Arabic poetry in its social context, Arabic book culture and the role of Arabic in world literature. Her books include "The Development of the Arabic Scripts: From the Nabatean Era to the First Islamic Century" (1993, Arabic translation 2004), "Medieval Arabic Praise Poetry: Ibn al-Rūmī and the Patron's Redemption" (2003), "The Life and Times of Abū Tammām (Akhbār Abī Tammām) by Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yaḥyāal-Ṣūlī" (2015) and "The Rise of the Arabic Book" (2020). For her research, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation, an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (both 2017) and the Berlin Science Prize (2019).

The Gotha Research Library preserves the third largest collection of Oriental manuscripts in Germany. These approximately 3,400 manuscripts, most of which came into the library around 1800, are relevant to all fields of scholarship and shed light on the most diverse aspects of manuscript cultures. By inviting renowned researchers to the Gotha Manuscript Talks, the Gotha Research Library would like to use the material in a webinar series to provide impulses for an increased exchange on manuscript cultures across disciplinary boundaries and to bring researchers and interested parties into conversation with each other about oriental manuscripts. The moderator is Dr. Feras Krimsti, who is in charge of the library's collection of oriental manuscripts.