Karla Mallette
· Professor of Mediterranean Studies, Department of Middle East Studies, and Professor of Italian, Department of Romance Languages and LiteraturesUniversity of Michigan · Middle Eastern Studies
Active 1998–2025
About
Karla Mallette is a Professor of Mediterranean Studies in the Department of Middle East Studies and a Professor of Italian in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, earned in 1998, and works on communications between languages and literary traditions in the medieval Mediterranean, especially Arabic, Latin, and the Romance vernaculars. Her research focuses on how literature, books, ideas, and material objects travel across the Mediterranean, how they are transformed in the process, and their cultural impact in new lands. Mallette's scholarly contributions include her first book, 'The Kingdom of Sicily, 1100-1250: A Literary History,' which describes the emergence of Italian poetry in a kingdom where poets wrote in Arabic a generation earlier. Her second book, 'European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean,' examines 19th and 20th-century European intellectuals who traced their national origins to Islamic and Christian contact in the medieval Mediterranean. Her forthcoming book, 'Lives of the Great Languages: Arabic and Latin in the Medieval Mediterranean,' studies how language strategies transcend boundaries, profiling Arabic and Latin as cosmopolitan languages that enable literary identities and trans-regional cultural debates. She is currently working on a project related to regimes of risk assessment and management in the pre-modern Mediterranean. Mallette has published essays on medieval translations of Aristotelian philosophy, framed narratives, European Orientalism, and Mediterranean Studies, and teaches courses on medieval Italian literature, modern Italian culture, Mediterranean Studies, Islamic world literature, and the Qur’an. She directed the Global Islamic Studies Center from 2014 to 2020 and is the Chair of the Department of Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan.
Research topics
- Linguistics
- Philosophy
- History
- Political Science
- Art
- Literature
- Computer Science
- Archaeology
- Law
Selected publications
25.02.06 Stahuljak, Zrinka. Fixers: Agency, Translation, and the Early Global History of Literature.
Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) · 2025-02-11
article1st authorCorrespondingConcluding Roundtable: Crisis and Optimism
Speculum · 2024-12-16
articleSenior author12 Sicilian Multilingualism and Cosmopolitan French
Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2024-05-30
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingSicilian Multilingualism and Cosmopolitan French
2024-04-25
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIntroduction: Medieval Studies and Its Institutions
Speculum · 2024-12-16
articleSenior author:<i>101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition</i>
Speculum · 2023-03-31
article1st authorCorrespondingTerritory / Frontiers / Routes: Space, Place and Language in the Mediterranean
2023-12-04
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingHow do we conceptualize the place of languages - and the literary traditions grounded in languages - in the Mediterranean? In a region crisscrossed by transit networks and flows of human travel, how do we locate language? In this essay, I draw upon a short list of key words used in the fields of literature, geography, history, and network theory - cosmopolitan language; space and place; territory, boundary and frontier - to map the movement of human and non-human actors, and to think about languages that are not instantiated in territory. My aim is to push back against national language ideology, which grants territorial sovereignty to language, seeing the national language as part of a portfolio of national behaviors and as a key component of state bureaucracy. Rather, I focus on specific linguistic behaviors of the pre-modern Mediterranean, which I propose are typical also of the late twentieth and twenty-first-century Mediterranean. Languages, like people, move. They are carried on the networks of human migration. Rather than challenge human mobility, as the national languages of modernity do, they facilitate movement: language transforms the writer into a nomad. In so doing, they convert the "space" of the Mediterranean into a "place" defined by intersecting languages and attendant literary traditions. By studying the character and behaviors of language across the frontiers of state sovereignty and on the routes of Mediterranean transit, I argue that we can better understand the literature of the Mediterranean, as well as emergent linguistic behaviors in the twenty-first-century Mediterranean.
Narration as Raumschach: Kalila and Dimna in time, space and languages
postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies · 2022 · 3 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Literature
- Linguistics
2021-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter introduces the early history of the Arabic language. It discusses the Qur'anic word for "language" and the Qur'an's self-awareness as an Arabic book. A capsule biography of eighth-century poet Bashshar ibn Burd illustrates the power of the cosmopolitan language to draw ambitious litterateurs who speak other languages as mother tongues, but choose to write in an acquired language because of the access to a broad public it grants. Bashshar wrote with pride and in Arabic about his Sasanian (non-Arab) ancestors, and for this reason he is associated with shu`ubiyya, a resistance movement against the expansion of the Arabic language into territory dominated by the Persianate culture of the Sasanian Empire. For this reason, his life and work serve as a succinct introduction to the allure of and resistance to the cosmopolitan language. The chapter discusses the written languages used in Central Asia during the eighth century in order to illustrate the power of the cosmopolitan language to provide a unified linguistic medium for regions characterized by linguistic complexity.
2021-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The commentary on Aristotle's Poetics by Ibn Rushd (Averroes) commentary was translated into Latin in 1256 by Hermannus Alemannus, and that commentary saw a fairly wide circulation in western Europe during the late Middle Ages. Earlier Arabic translations of the Poetics used the word hikaya to translate Aristotle's technical term for the plot of Greek drama, mythos. Ibn Rushd chose a different Arabic word to analyze plot – khurafa, fable – in part because hikaya had taken on a new meaning in the century between the first Arabic translation of the Poetics and his own commentary. This chapter follows the fates of the translation of the word "plot" through Ibn Rushd's commentary into Hermannus's Latin translation – where the word becomes fabula – and into the poetry of Petrarch. It argues that Petrarch's use of the Italian word favola is informed in part by Hermannus's Latin translation of Ibn Rushd's commentary, and that Petrarch meant his favola to absorb some of the connotations conveyed by the Hermannus's use of the Latin fabula.
Frequent coauthors
- 2 shared
Carla Freccero
University of California System
- 2 shared
Roland Betancourt
- 1 shared
Bruce Holsinger
- 1 shared
Hans Mair
Hôpital Georges-Clemenceau
- 1 shared
W Junta
Hôpital Georges-Clemenceau
- 1 shared
Cuno Of Manderscheid
Hôpital Georges-Clemenceau
- 1 shared
Jody Blanco
University of California System
- 1 shared
Lisa Cartwright
University of California System
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