Suzanne Akbari

University of Toronto, English and Medieval Studies, Faculty Member

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Books by Suzanne Akbari

How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari

[Co-editor]. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 9th revised edition. 2 vols.

A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette

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The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross

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[Co-editor.] The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Shorter Third Edition. 2 vols.

[Co-editor, responsible for Volume B: 100 to 1500] The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 3rd revised edition. 6 vols.

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450

Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci

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Seeing Through the Veil: Theories of Vision and the Development of Late Medieval Allegory

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Articles/ Book Chapters by Suzanne Akbari

“Seeing Jerusalem: Schematic Views of the Holy City, 1100-1300”

by Suzanne Akbari and Asa S Mittman

Aspects of Knowledge: Preserving and Reinventing Traditions of Learning in the Middle Age. Ed. Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. 116-41.

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“AHR Conversation: Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History”

American Historical Review, 2017

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"Modeling Medieval World Literature"

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2017

This article describes three models for integrating the study of medieval texts within world lite... more This article describes three models for integrating the study of medieval texts within world literature. First, "Mediterraneans" point to sites where diverse cosmopolitan regional centers are connected by a sea. Second, "distant reading" is deployed in tracing literary forms and themes over long periods of time and across cultures within medieval literature. Third, and most extensively, a model based on "moving things" is developed to track the ways in which objects and persons are used in medieval texts to precipitate cultural and social change on a large scale. Following the traveling objects in The Canterbury Tales, The Book of John Mandeville, the Kebra Nagast, and the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the article presents new patterns of conceptualizing literary history.

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"Sight Lines: The Mirror of the Mind in Medieval Poetics"

Specular Reflections: The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Ed. Nancy Frelick. , 2016

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“The Form of Heaven: Dante’s Islamic Paradise”

Dante and the Christian Imagination. Ed. Domenico Pietropaolo, 2015

"Ovid and Ovidianism"

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1: The Middle Ages. Ed. Rita Copeland. , 2015

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“Ekphrasis and Stasis in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan"

The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture. Ed. Andrew James Johnson, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse. , 2015

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“Embodying the Historical Moment: Tombs and Idols in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César”

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“The Time of Salvation: Langland’s Non-Christian Others”

The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman. Rev. ed. Ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway., 2014

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"Love for Lucretius: The Perils of Affective Historiography"

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“The Persistence of Philology: Language and Connectivity in the Mediterranean”

A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette., 2013

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How We Write: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blank Page. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari

[Co-editor]. The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. 9th revised edition. 2 vols.

A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette

Download

The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross

Download

[Co-editor.] The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Shorter Third Edition. 2 vols.

[Co-editor, responsible for Volume B: 100 to 1500] The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 3rd revised edition. 6 vols.

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100-1450

Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci

Download

Seeing Through the Veil: Theories of Vision and the Development of Late Medieval Allegory

Download

“Seeing Jerusalem: Schematic Views of the Holy City, 1100-1300”

by Suzanne Akbari and Asa S Mittman

Aspects of Knowledge: Preserving and Reinventing Traditions of Learning in the Middle Age. Ed. Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. 116-41.

Download

“AHR Conversation: Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History”

American Historical Review, 2017

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"Modeling Medieval World Literature"

Middle Eastern Literatures, 2017

Download

"Sight Lines: The Mirror of the Mind in Medieval Poetics"

Specular Reflections: The Mirror in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Ed. Nancy Frelick. , 2016

Download

“The Form of Heaven: Dante’s Islamic Paradise”

Dante and the Christian Imagination. Ed. Domenico Pietropaolo, 2015

"Ovid and Ovidianism"

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, Vol. 1: The Middle Ages. Ed. Rita Copeland. , 2015

Download

“Ekphrasis and Stasis in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan"

The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture. Ed. Andrew James Johnson, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse. , 2015

Download

“Embodying the Historical Moment: Tombs and Idols in the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César”

Download

“The Time of Salvation: Langland’s Non-Christian Others”

The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman. Rev. ed. Ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway., 2014

Download

"Love for Lucretius: The Perils of Affective Historiography"

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“The Persistence of Philology: Language and Connectivity in the Mediterranean”

A Sea of Languages: Rethinking the Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Karla Mallette., 2013

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“Death as Metamorphosis in the Devotional and Political Allegory of Christine de Pizan”

The Ends of the Body: Identity and Community in Medieval Culture. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Jill Ross. , 2012

The essays in this volume have highlighted the interplay between the individual body and the comm... more The essays in this volume have highlighted the interplay between the individual body and the communal body: that is, the way in which the community is figured as a body that contains mutually interdependent members, and excludes that which lies outside its boundaries. This closing essay focuses on how the body's apparent stability is undercut by its necessarily changeable nature: just as the individual human body appears different over time, just as it matures, eventually weakens, and finally dies and decays, so too the communal body is subject to alteration. Change is in its nature. In the Christian vision of community, however, the collective body of the Church could be understood as immutable because its template is the eternal and unchanging form of Christ. In this view, the perfect flesh of the Incarnation, remaining eternally whole as resurrected body, models the wholeness of the community of the Church that is at once a mirror of Christ and his bride. Secular notions of community were somewhat different. Even though notions of the body politic were modelled upon conceptions of the Christian community, the immutability that could be assumed by the Church was not so readily available to the nation. On the contrary, mutability was written into the very fabric of the nation, not only in the lived realities of political conflict and continually redrawn national boundaries, but also in the elaborate (and, often, imaginary) genealogical relationships that underlay medieval European constructions of the nation. Change, in other words, had to be reckoned with in the effort to describe the contours of the late medieval body politic. This effort is the focus of the present essay, which explores the tension between the individual and the communal body in two works by Christine de Pizan, both of which portray the necessary phenomenon of change: the Livre du corps de policie, written Akbari-Ross_3964_283_(Akbari).indd 283 7/6/2012 4:42:47 PM

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“The Other’s Images: Christian Iconoclasm and the Charge of Muslim Idolatry in Medieval Europe”

Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion, and Assimilation. Ed. Anja Eisenbeiss and Lieselotte E. Saurma-Jeltsch. , 2012

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"Erasing the Body: History and Memory in Medieval Siege Poetry"

Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity. Ed. Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager. , 2012

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“The Object of Devotion: Fundamentalist Perspectives on the Medieval Past”

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“Becoming Human”

The state of being human has become difficult to pin down. Earlier ages had an easier time separa... more The state of being human has become difficult to pin down. Earlier ages had an easier time separating the human from the non-human -that is, the animal, thought to be of a lower nature, lacking both the power of reason and an immortal soul. Modern views of the human are both more complex and more urgently expressed: non-human humanity, so to speak, can be found not only r

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“Shaping Knowledge: The Movement from Verse to Prose in the Allegories of Christine de Pizan”

Poetry, Knowledge and Community in Late Medieval France. Ed. Rebecca Dixon and Finn E. Sinclair. , 2008

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“Between Diaspora and Conquest: Norman Assimilation in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and Marie de France’s Fables”

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. New Middle Ages. , 2008

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“Currents and Currency in Marco Polo’s Divisement dou monde and The Book of John Mandeville”

Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci., 2008

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“Introduction: East, West, and In-between”

Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West. Ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Amilcare Iannucci. , 2008

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Webinar: The Beta Israel and Ethiopian Christian Views of Jews and Judaism

by Samantha Kelly, Suzanne Akbari, Sophia Dege-Müller, and Aaron Butts

Webinar of the Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) Ethiopian Studies Series, introduction ... more

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Asa Simon Mittman and Suzanne Conklin Akbari, “Seeing Jerusalem: Schematic Views of the Holy City, 1100-1300,” Aspects of Knowledge: Preserving and Reinventing Traditions of Learning in the Middle Ages, ed. Marilina Cesario and Malte Urban (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

by Asa S Mittman and Suzanne Akbari

The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment... more The fine details of this map are worth close attention. The design, layout, judicious employment of spot colour, inscriptions, inclusions and exclusions are carefully modulated to provide rich material for ruminative viewing. This folio does, after all, present the sacred omphalos of the world, a space layered with ancient meanings and caught up in dynamic, immediate political circumstances and military conflicts. In this chapter, we will focus on this single sheet, with attention paid to three main aspects of its construction and contents: the history of the abbey where it was drawn; its role as micro- and macrocosm; and its negotiation of the interplay between space and time, which meet at the intersection of the ‘Street to the Temple of the Lord’ and the ‘Street of the Gate of Mount Zion’ with eschatological significance. Maps sit in a potent position between the recording and production of knowledge, reflecting the ‘real world’ but necessarily transforming it through the process of reduction and schematisation. The map of Jerusalem and its environs in Add. 32343 actively negotiates between various forms of knowledge, as it makes arguments about the significance of Jerusalem in political and divine history. By exploring the layered significance of this map in two dimensions – first, through a close visual study of the Add. 32343 map, in the context of other medieval maps; second, through a narrative examination of the document’s origins and comparative study of a prose itinerary of Frankish Jerusalem – we aim to provide views of the sacred city from two different perspectives, as it was conceived in the high medieval imagination.

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Writing East: The 'Travels' of Sir John Mandeville by Iain Macleod Higgins (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 1998

James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, eds., Ovid in the Middle Ages. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xii, 372; 21 black-and-white figures. $113. ISBN: 978-1-107-00205-0

Speculum, 2014

<i>Medievalisms in the Post-colonial World: The Idea of “the Middle Ages” Outside Europe</i> (review)

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2011

<i>Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England</i> (review)

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2008

Sarah Kay, The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry. (The Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. xi, 236; 10 black-and-white figures. $59.95

Speculum, 2008

V. A. Kolve. Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. 408. $65.00 (cloth)

The Journal of British Studies, 2012

Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology, and Religious Life

Isis, 2007

... decade, such as Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 199... more

Fatemeh Chehregosha Azinfar, Atheism in the Medieval Islamic and European World: The Influence of Persian and Arabic Ideas of Doubt and Skepticism on Medieval European Literary Thought (Bethesda, Md.: Ibex Publishers, 2008). Pp. 272. $80.00 cloth

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2011

This is an apparently unrevised dissertation completed in the Department of Comparative Literatur... more

"The Book and the Silk Roads: Corralling Data in the Digital Workspace". IAS Talk by Suzanne Akbari, J. D. Sargan, Jessica Lockhart, and Rachel Di Cresce

by Jessica Lockhart and Suzanne Akbari

Institute for Advanced Study: Digital Scholarship Conversations, December 4, 2020, 2020

“The Book and the Silk Roads” project seeks to build and support a growing international network ... more “The Book and the Silk Roads” project seeks to build and support a growing international network of scholars, curators, conservators, and scientists exploring significant developments in writing technologies within a range of contexts, focusing particularly on examples of convergent evolution and interchange across the pre-modern world, from East Asia to Mesoamerica. In our presentation we will address how we have handled the technical challenge underlying this research agenda: how to bring different sets of heterogeneous data together in a user-friendly way, while making use of standardized data sharing frameworks to ensure it is open and reusable both across and outside of our tools.

SPEAKERS:
Suzanne Akbari, Professor of Medieval Studies, IAS
Rachel Di Cresce, Project Librarian, The Book and the Silk Roads
Jessica Lockhart, Head of Research, The Book and the Silk Roads
J. D. Sargan, Leverhulme Research Fellow, Old Books, New Science Lab
https://www.ias.edu/video/book-and-silk-roads-corralling-data-digital-workspace

Suzanne Akbari

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