On October 14th, Dr. Ross Brann, presented a public lecture at the Dodd Center, Konover Auditorium, titled “An Intimate Encourter: The Jews and Classical Islam”.

On October 15th, Dr. Ross Brann spoke to faculty and guests at a Research Seminar on the topic “Inscribing the Mediterranean Journey”.  Both events were well attended.

Dr. Brann is the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, and Acting Chair, Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.  He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, New York University, and the American University in Cairo. He has taught at Cornell University since 1986 and served sixteen years as Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Professor Brann is the author of The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991) and Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Muslims and Jews in Islamic Spain (Princeton University Press, 2002).  He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.  Brann is also the editor of four volumes and author of essays on the intersection of medieval Jewish and Islamic cultures.  He is currently working on Andalusi Moorings: Al-Andalus and Sefarad as Tropes of Muslim and Jewish Culture.

The events were sponsored by the UConn Vice President for Research, the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Departments of English, History, Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Medieval Studies and Philosophy and the Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies.