The landscape of the Islamic Mediterranean (from greater Syria to the Iberian Peninsula) differed significantly from the Roman landscape upon which it was built. Islamic water management, laws regarding individual land ownership and labor, and even the crops that were cultivated reflected a new perspective on the land that encouraged investment and innovation. One of the most profound changes was the construction of canal networks to introduce irrigation into dry land. Despite the large scale of such networks, they were generally not top-down endeavors, but shared projects undertaken by the community that benefited most from the water. In addition to irrigation and expanded agricultural productivity, the collaborative effort gave shape to a social structure based on the sharing of environmental resources.

Co-sponsored by The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The Department of History, The School of Art, The Department of Anthropology, The Middle East Studies Program and The School of Landscape Architecture.

If you cannot attend in person, please register for the Webinar using the link below: https://tennessee.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_299BYkycQAKCVW7XcGfG5Q

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This potluck dinner will feature an Arab culture trivia game, student study abroad travel scholarship information, and student Middle Eastern baking and traditional dress competitions. $100 prize each.

Please consider bringing a side-dish to share.

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This lecture examines the rich world of piyyut, liturgical Hebrew poetry composed for synagogue performance, communal worship, and life cycle events. It asks how we should think about modern Hebrew literature's so-called "revival" when piyyut never died out but continued to be written and sung among Jewish communities across the Middle East and North Africa throughout the medieval and modern periods. In doing so, the lecture challenges conventional narratives of Hebrew literary and religious history, which overlook continuous living devotional traditions in the region while overstating the creative ingenuity of the rupture caused by European Jewish secularization during the nineteenth century. Tracing piyyut's enduring legacy and its influence on the emergence of Mizrahi poetry in 1970s Israel, the lecture argues that attending to liturgical and devotional composition offers a fuller picture of Jewish textual modernity. Through comparative readings of early modern piyyut and mid-twentieth-century Mizrahi poetry, the lecture introduces the concept of "polyphonic supplementary intertextuality" to show how both poetic corpora weave multiple voices through citation and allusion, drawing on biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic sources to critique social marginalization, represent transgressive desire, and articulate a model of selfhood constituted through heteronomous communal religious commitment rather than individual autonomy. This framework ultimately challenges dominant paradigms in modern Hebrew studies and the study of Jewish religious practice, suggesting that the boundary between devotional and secular writing in modern Jewish life is far more porous than has been assumed, and that this porosity carries its own liberatory political power.

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