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Telephone: (617) 552-1871 Office Location: 21 Campanella Way, 465 Email: sajdi@bc.edu Curriculum Vitae: please click here |
Education
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2002
Fields of Interest
Pre-modern Middle Eastern history (mainly but not exclusively Ottoman history); popular and learned literary cultures; historiography; book history and urban history.
Academic Profile
Sajdi's main interest is literary culture and the politics of textual production, especially of memorial/historical genres, such as chronicles, biographies, and city histories. She wrote a dissertation on a social and literary phenomenon of authorship of chronicles by commoners and marginals in the eighteenth-century Levant (roughly, the Arabic-speaking part of the eastern Mediterranean). She is currently writing a book on the "life and work" of one of these commoner-historians, entitled, "the Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Middle East." She has edited a volume on Ottoman culture, Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2008); and co-edited with Marle Hammond another volume focusing on Arabic elegiac poetry, "Transforming Loss into Beauty": Essays in Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Magda Al-Nowaihi (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, forthcoming). Her next project is on a particular city-genre that memorializes Damascus. The project relates the literary representations of the city to changing social configurations and to civic ownership of the urban public space.
Representative Publications
- "Decline, its Discontents, and Ottoman Cultural History: by Way of Introduction," in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyles in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi, (2008, London, IB Tauris).
- "A Room of His Own: the 'History' of the Barber of Damascus (fl. 1762)," The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (2004), 19-35. [Awarded the Syrian Studies Association Prize for Best Published Article in 2004].
- "Trespassing the Male Domain: The qasidah of Layla al-Akhyaliyyah," Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2 (2000), 121-146.