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Shamil Jeppie, our last scholar-in-residence this year, will join us in-person from Monday, May 2 to Friday, May 6. He will present at the Seminar in Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora in addition to presenting an informal seminar to the BGC community.
Shamil Jeppie teaches history at the University of Cape Town, where he also established the Tombouctou Manuscripts Project in the early 2000s to research the book culture in Timbuktu and the broader region. The volume The Meanings of Timbuktu (2008; French translation 2011) brought together work by outside scholars, local experts, and collectors and provided many images of individual texts. Jeppie is completing a general introduction to the book provisionally titled Timbuktu: Desert Scholars and Collectors. Apart from this area of work, he has written on aspects of South African urban social history and is involved in Africa-wide and South-South humanities networks. He was educated in Cape Town and Princeton.
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Community Happy Hour
Tuesday, May 3, 5–6 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lobby
All students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend an informal gathering with Shamil Jeppie in advance of his evening lecture. Light refreshments will be served.
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Seminar in Art and Material Culture of Africa and the African Diaspora
“Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Books and Exile in the Sahara”
Tuesday, May 3, 6–7:30 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
Books have a longer history in West Africa and the Sahara than has been acknowledged until recently. A culture of writing and reading was firmly established in Timbuktu by the fifteenth century, and books were among the objects that moved with trading caravans across the Sahara. Against this background, this lecture will examine a case of reading and writing by an exile, the scholar Ahmad Bābā from Timbuktu, in Marrakesh in the 1590s.
This talk will be accessible via Zoom in addition to being held in-person at 38 West 86th Street.
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Brown Bag Lunch
“Book Collecting in Timbuktu”
Thursday, May 5, 12:15–1:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
In a manuscript book culture, how did books circulate and how were libraries constituted? What was the response to print materials when they were encountered in the nineteenth century? This talk will introduce the different practices and ideas about collecting in Timbuktu and the broader region between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries.
This talk is only open to the BGC community and will be accessible via Zoom in addition to being held in-person at 38 West 86th Street.
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COPY AND PASTE CODE BELOW TO MAILCHIMP
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