W&L Professors Each Present Papers at the 34th Deutscher Orientalistentag Timothy Lubin and Anthony Edwards both presented at the event held in Berlin earlier this month.

By Brian Laubscher
September 27, 2022

Timothy Lubin and Anthony Edwards, core faculty members for Washington and Lee’s Middle East and South Asia Studies program, presented papers at the 34th Deutscher Orientalistentag (DOT) held at the Free University of Berlin on September 12-17.

Lubin is the Jessie Ball duPont Professor of Religion and head of the Law, Justice, and Society program at W&L. His paper, “Endowment Charters as Legal and Political Instruments,” analyzes inscriptions from the fifth to 10th centuries that served as charters for creating or restoring religious foundations. He uses a comparison to similar charters from medieval Europe to show the relation of “church and state” in ancient South and Southeast Asia.

Lubin’s paper was a follow-up to a previous presentation titled “Licchavi Heritage at the Crossroads: Multidisciplinary Approaches to History and Heritage in Nepal” held at the University of Oxford in early September. That discussion dealt with the same principles, but with a focus on early inscriptions from Nepal from the fifth to the eighth centuries. Both of Lubin’s papers are based on research as part of the DHARMA Project (European Research Council Grant No. 809994) and are supported by a Lenfest summer grant.

Edwards is an assistant professor of Arabic at W&L, and he presented on a paper titled “Educating and Entertaining America: The US Lecture Tour of “The Syrian Traveller,” Gregory M. Wortabet (1828-93).” His paper, which is also supported by a Lenfest summer grant, focuses on Wortabet’s solo travels as a lecturer throughout the U.S. in the mid-1850’s. Wortabet’s lectures demonstrate that America was an active site of popular Orientalism in the mid-19th century and that a man from what we now called the Middle East was among its contributors.

The DOT, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2022, was first organized in 1921 and is the oldest German association of scholars who focus primarily on languages and cultures of the Middle East, parts of Asia, Oceania and Africa. Scholars of all phases of their career are invited to present and discuss their research to an audience of specialists and interested members of the public.

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