Assistant Professor of Literature Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi B.A., Ph.D. University of Chicago Maurice Pomerantz is a scholar of pre-modern Arabic Literature and Islamicate Literary cultures. His interests include the history of Arabic belles lettres, geography and economy in Arabic literature, and Arabic and Islamic literatures in a global context. Prior to joining the Literature department at NYUAD, Maurice Pomerantz taught premodern Arabic Literature for the past four years at NYU New York in the Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies (MEIS). His dissertation, entitled Licit Magic and Divine Grace, was a study of the letters of the tenth-century statesman and belletrist, al-Ṣāḥib b. 'Abbād, exploring the complex relations between political power, patronage, and literary performance. He is revising this work for publication in 2014. Pomerantz’s current project concerns the history of the form of short picaresque Arabic prose narratives known as maqāmāt or literary séances. Invented in the tenth century in Eastern Iran, maqāmāt remained a vital mode of literary expression until the early twentieth century. Like the adventures of the itinerant characters that the tales describe, the practice of maqāma writing traveled throughout most regions of the Muslim world, traversing cultural, religious, and linguistic boundaries. Tracing the imagined itineraries and economies through the analysis of various hitherto unpublished maqāma works, the book hopes to consider features pre-modern Arabic literary production in a comparative and global context. At NYUAD in 2012, Pomerantz convened a conference in NYUAD with Evelyn Birge Vitz (NYUNY), “Courts and Performance in the Premodern Middle East: 700-1600” which invited an interdisciplinary group of scholars and performers of Middle Eastern literary, cultural, and musical traditions to discuss a set of common interests. In 2014, Vitz and Pomerantz are organizing a second conference on the phenomenon of “Tales that Travel: Storytelling in Eurasia from the 10th -16th centuries.” Pomerantz spent the 2012-13 academic year as a US Fulbright Scholar in Beirut, Lebanon and Amman, Jordan, working on the textual history of the Maqāmāt of Badīʿ al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī (d. 398/1008).

Literature

Mamluk Studies

Iran

Islamic World

Yemen

Hist Of Arabic Prose

Arabic Folklore

Classical Arabic Literature

Arabic (advanced)

French (elementary)

German (intermediate)

Greek (elementary)

Persian (intermediate)

Spanish (elementary)