Center for Advanced Study’s Professor Akbari Visits Mac

By Zoë Roos Scheuerman ’24

On Wednesday, March 27th, Dr. Suzanne Conklin Akbari of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, visited Macalester to share her work in two campus-wide events:  a lunch talk in the Harmon Roon about her recent work and a conversation at Literary Salon about the literary podcast which she hosts, the Spouter Inn, and the joys of reading out loud. Professor Akbari, invited by Dr. Coral Lumbley, is a medievalist focusing on optics and allegory and European views of Islam and Orient. In addition to this work and her podcast, she has edited volumes about travel literature, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer (2020), and The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 

Akbari’s recent work has also engaged with indigenous North American connections to the Silk Roads, especially the Lenape people and Lenapehoking (Lenape land). In her lunch talk, Professor Akbari shared her recent work with Lenape language and art as well as her work co-curating a “Hidden Stories” exhibition at the Aga Khan museum during the pandemic. Dr. Akbari then shared her wider reflections about how periodization can obscure continuity and the connections between localities and global networks, including sometimes overlooked localities in North America and the global Silk Roads network usually not thought to expand to the “New World.”

During the Literary Salon, Professor Akbari reflected on having a literary podcast and what it means to read out loud when reading both relies on words’ phonetics and is often considered a silent process. Several students read aloud from their favorite books, Dr. Akbari read from the poetry collection Trickster Academy by Jenny Davis, and the group discussed how affective the experience of being read aloud to can be. Dr. Akbari also touched on the importance of reading aloud in the classroom, where course texts are picked to be in “conversation” with each other, and how reading out loud makes reading a communal experience.

Thank you to Dr. Akbari for all of your time and insights!