Date: Thursday, February 26, 2026, from 12:30-2:00PM  Eastern Time

Location: Zoom

Series: Devotion and Distraction

Speaker: Konrad Hirschler (Universität Hamburg) 

Respondent: Elaine van Dalen (Columbia University)

With the sense of possibility occasioned by each new technology of the written word, the aspiration to know all that there is to know takes on new life. But even as the printing press or the e-book have at the moment of their invention promised to increase access, they also have led to an exponential increase in new texts. Moreover, although strategies of information management have shifted over time, the feeling of information overload is recurrent and transhistorical. It certainly is not unique to the age of print culture or the internet era. Medieval and early modern Islamic scholars, working with manuscripts and pursuing research across a range of interrelated encyclopedic genres, honed myriad techniques for organizing and retrieving knowledge. How might we weave together these histories of information management and the religious sciences?

Free and open to the public

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