Colonial Vocabularies

Sarah Irving is Lecturer at Staffordshire University, PI of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and Editor-in-chief of Contemporary Levant (Francis & Taylor). Her PhD, at the University of Edinburgh, focused on knowledge creation amongst a small group of Palestinian Christians during the Mandate period, and her subsequent research has primarily concerned the role of local labourers, especially women, in archaeology in Late Ottoman Palestine. She has taught at King’s College London and Edge Hill University and a member of CrossRoads (Leiden University). She is the author of a number of scholarly articles on the uses and operation of history and archaeology in Late Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and on contemporary Arabic literature. Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University, specializing in a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and its communities. She has published on multilingualism and language policy in Palestine during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods. Her last publications include ‘Unsilencing Palestine 1922-1923. Hundred years after Frank Scholten’s visit to the Holy Land, Contemporary Levant, 2024; ‘Orthodoxy and solidarity: Niqula Khoury’s journey to the League of Nations’ (with S. Irving) in ‘Palestine's Christians and the Nationalist Cause. The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods, edited by Erik Freas, Routledge, 2024. Rachel Mairs is Professor of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Reading, United Kingdom. She works on ancient and nineteenth-to-early-twentieth-century multilingualism in the Middle East, with a particular interest in interpreters. Her books include The Graeco-Bactrian World (ed. 2021), The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014), Archaeologists, Tourists, Interpreters (with Maya Muratov, 2015) and From Khartoum to Jerusalem: The Dragoman Solomon Negima and his Clients (2016). Her monograph on the history of phrasebooks for colloquial Arabic and their authors, Arabic Dialogues, has recently come out with University College London Press (2024). Lucia Admiraal is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Groningen University. She specializes in modern Arab intellectual history and literature. Her publications include ‘Celebrating Maimonides in Cairo (1935): Jewish historiography, Islamic philosophy and the nahda’, Contemporary Levant, 2023. Her monograph, Confronting Fascism in the Arabic Jewish Press. Intellectual Debates and Entangled Loyalties, 1933-1948, was published in 2024 by I.B. Tauris.