April 21, 2022 
1:30 pm (ET)
Online via Zoom

The Italian and Mediterranean Colloquium

Presenter: Peter Kitlas (Emory University)
Discussant: Tunç Şen (Columbia University)
Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)

Throughout his career as a Viennese ‘language boy,’ Franz von Dombay (d. 1810) collected hundreds of personal letters, which he collated in several scrapbooks. While past scholars have done much work to demonstrate the ways in which Dombay excelled in his service across Morocco and the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth century, this talk focuses on the pedagogical techniques and practices of his Moroccan teacher, Ḥasan al-Wāfalāwī. Kitlas demonstrates how a closer examination of the numerous letters written by al-Wāfalāwī to Dombay sheds light on their function as linguistic exercises and language learning opportunities. Through these letters, it becomes possible to think more critically about the dialectical features of language learning between student and teacher in eighteenth-century Morocco.

Event sponsored by the Italian Department, the European Institute, and the Center for the Study of Muslim Societies, Columbia University