The Quest for Modern Language
Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
April 13–14, 2023
Neubauer Collegium
5701 S. Woodlawn Ave.
Language ideologies were an important component of modern nationalism, and they figured prominently in the cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around what came to be known as “the Middle East” in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This conference will bring together scholars across humanistic and social scientific disciplines (such as history, literary theory, linguistics, and anthropology) to explore the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernizing world.
Participants
Usman Ahmedani (University of Amsterdam)
Dima Ayoub (Middlebury College)
İlker Aytürk (Bilkent University)
Marilyn Booth (University of Oxford)
Itamar Francez (University of Chicago)
Annie Greene (University of Chicago)
Dyala Hamzah (Université de Montréal)
Aidan Kaplan (University of Chicago)
Stefanos Katsikas (University of Chicago)
Benjamin Kroeber (Rutgers University)
Michiel Leezenberg (University of Amsterdam)
Walid Saleh (University of Toronto)
Elena Simonato (Université de Lausanne)
Johann Strauss (University of Strasbourg)
Emmanuel Szurek (University of Amsterdam)
Esra Tasdelen (University of Chicago)
Olga Verlato (New York University)
About the Research Project
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, 1820–1948 is a collaborative, multidisciplinary initiative to examine the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The project brings together historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to study the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernized or quickly modernizing world. The research team is also exploring the role of developments in linguistics, philology, and adjacent disciplines in informing and shaping such ideas. Some of the questions that animate the project are: What does it mean for a language to be or become a modern language? Can, and should, a dead language be revived? How do notions of native tongue, language family, vernacular dialect, or register interact with concepts such as empire, nation, and motherland? How does the relation between language and the body figure in projects of (re)generation of modern polities and individuals? By studying authors who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and their interaction with the political and cultural bodies and movements that played important roles in shaping the modern Middle East, this project aims to reconstruct, and draw new insights about, the rich nexus of language, identity, and modernity.
IMAGE: Map illustration courtesy Itamar Francez.
