Embedded within and across contemporary institutional manuscript collections are earlier traces of collecting, readership, and value that can be explored through the annotations and material features of discrete copies as well as independent historical accounts of individuals, communities, and institutions.
Curatorial transparency and investment in effective description and reconnection — undertaking and supporting provenance research, tracing collectors and communities in cataloguing, and recognizing and empowering contemporary community agency in interpretation — is essential for surfacing these traces and for recovering the cultural memory embodied in these materials prior to their displacement from their earlier contexts.
This talk will explore these ideas through the Tiflis Collection of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian manuscripts now in the University of Michigan Library — reaching through collection provenance to trace the migrations of these portable and vulnerable objects and surface their embedded memory of earlier associations, meanings, and collection contexts with a particular focus on 19th century foundation libraries (vakıf kütüphaneleri) established for the use of students and scholars in the vicinity of Trabzon and Erzurum.
Evyn Kropf, is a librarian and curator of Islamic manuscripts at the University of Michigan Library. As a specialist of Islamic codicology and Arabic manuscript culture, her particular interests include writing material (especially paper), structural repairs, reading and collecting practices of the Ottoman era as well as the significance of pictograms and other visual content for Sufi knowledge transmission.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, Islamic Studies