Dr. Megan Eaton Robb is speaking at a virtual conference hosted by Stanford University.
Professor Robb's talk is entitled "Forming Muslim Emotions, Forming Muslim Nations" beginning the evening of Sunday June 14th or the morning of Monday Jne 15th, and it will be available to conference registrants for seven days. To get access to the link please register at this link for the conference. Be sure to watch and comment next week, as the talk will only be aired for seven days before it is taken down.
This presentation is based on the early work for Dr. Robb's second book project which focuses on the connection between calligraphy, emotions, and the formation of nations in twentieth century South Asia. It builds off of research into lithographic newspapers se conducted for my first book, Print and the Urdu Public: Muslims, Newspapers, and Urban Life, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in October. Her book overall argues we should take seriously the materiality of lithographic printing, and in particular lithographed newspapers as sources that tell us something about everyday Muslim life and piety in the early twentieth century. In that book she focuses on the case study of a previously under-studied newspaper called Madinah, which appears in this presentation too. Here she is focusing on the coding of emotions with calligraphy and its reproduction using lithography. Her source material for this project is a range of Urdu periodicals, Urdu scholarship on the history of calligraphy, and printing/calligraphy handbooks across the 20th century.