Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of period 4 (months 1-60/January 2017-December 2021) tackled MMS-II's three main objectives:
[1] the creation of a comprehensive database-survey of Arabic historical works produced in the period 1410-1470 (ihodp.ugent.be/bah)
[2] in-depth case studies of discrete sets of Arabic historical works from the period 1410-1470 (historiographical corpuses of al-ʿAynī, al-Biqāʿī, Ibn Ḥajar, Ibn Qāḍī Shuhba, Ibn Taghrībirdī and Ibn ʿArabshāh), which were questioned from the perspectives of contexts, texts, and meanings.
Workshops and conferences: four project workshops on ‘Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography’ (December 2017; December 2018; December 2019; December 2020; Gent and online); project panels and individual papers at the fifth, sixth and seventh conferences of the School of Mamluk Studies (July 2018, Gent; June 2019, Tokyo; July 2021, online); project panel at the International Medieval Congress (July 2019, Leeds); project panel at the Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (October 2020, Washington/online); project papers at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Conference ‘in Search for a Hidden Group’ (December 2020; Bonn/online); two project panels at Quatrième Congres des études sur le moyen-orient et les mondes musulmans (June-July 2021, Aix/online); postdoc monograph presentations at the project’s closing conference (November 2021; Cairo and online).
Main publications: Trajectories of State Formation across fifteenth-century Islamic West-Asia (ed. J. Van Steenbergen, Brill, 2020); New Readings in Arabic Historiography from late medieval Egypt and Syria (eds. J. Van Steenbergen, M. Termonia, Brill 2021); special journal issue Mamlūk Studies Review 23 (2020).
New series: Critical Approaches to Arabic Historiography (Edinburgh University Press; series editors K. Goudie & J. Van Steenbergen)
[3] a discourse-analytical study of the political vocabularies of Arabic historiographical works from the period 1410-1470, with a particular focus on identifying and explaining the semantics of signifiers of particular political discourses that informed these texts and that, at the same time, materialised through them. To this end, most of the corpus texts have been digitized via collaborative partnerships (OpenITI, Transkribus, Calfa, UGent central library) and our own pre- and postprocessing work, and an online platform (IHODP.ugent.be/corpus) has been developed (by Inuits) as a research tool for textual and semantic analysis.
Workshops and conferences: two project workshops on ‘Fifteenth-Century Arabic Historiography’ (December 2019; December 2020; Gent and online); project paper at the Arabic Pasts: Histories and Historiographies conference (October 2020, London); project paper at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg Conference ‘in Search for a Hidden Group’ (December 2020; Bonn/online); paper at Quatrième Congrès des études sur le moyen orient et les mondes musulmans (June-July 2021, Aix/online); individual paper at the seventh conference of the School of Mamluk Studies (July 2021, online); monograph presentations at the MMS-II closing conference (November 2021; Cairo and online).
Main publications (all under review, in revision or in press): Van Steenbergen, “In Search of the Awlād al-Nās. Arabic Historiography, Mamlūkization, and the Semantics and Discursive Politics of a Polysemous Concept.” In Where are the Awlad al-Nas?, ed. A. Kollatz, Bonn: Bonn UP; Termonia & Van Steenbergen, “Historiography, and the Making of the Sultan’s Court in Fifteenth Century Cairo. The Case of the Court Office of ‘the Chief Head of the Guards’ (ra’s nawbat al-nuwab).” Annales Islamologiques 56 (2022); Van Steenbergen, “From Warfare in Cyprus to State-making in Cairo: Narrative and Semantic Strategies in the Contemporary Chronicle of al-Maqrīzī (c. 1365-1442).” In The Mamluk Empire and Cyprus, ed. G. Christ, Leuven: Peeters Publishers.