Listening to Thirteenth-Century Cairo and Damascus: What's New in Late Ayyubid Poetry?

Dr Betty Rosen is visiting the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) on Wednesday 4 November, talking about late Ayyubid poetry in thirteenth-century Cairo and Damascus. The talk is part of the IAIS 'Majlis' series, which does things a bit differently from a standard lecture: instead of a straight presentation, speakers frame their research within their own academic journey, so you get to hear how the work came together alongside the findings themselves.

Rosen is a scholar of Arabic poetry and poetics, specialising in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (1171–1517) and the modern afterlives of medieval Arabic theories of language and poetics. She's currently a postdoctoral researcher at King's College London on the UKRI-funded project Musical Lives: Towards an Historical Anthropology of French Song, 1100–1300, and is working on a monograph, Language Marvels: Al-Badīʿ In and Beyond Arabic-Islamic Poetics. She's also published 'Timing Critique in Arabic' in Cultural Critique (2025) and 'The Listening Self' in Al-ʿUṣūr al-wusṭa (2026), so this session sits right in the middle of her recent work.

The talk runs from 17:00 to 18:30 in Lecture Theatre 2 at the IAIS, University of Exeter, and it's a hybrid session, so you can either head in person or join via Zoom if you're watching from home. There are refreshments in the IAIS Common Room from 16:30, which is a good chance to arrive early and settle in before it kicks off. The Q&A isn't recorded, so the discussion stays between the people in the room and on the call.