Oral Tradition Volume 4, Number 1-2January 1989
About the Authors
R. Marston Speight
R. Marston Speight, historian of religions, adjunct faculty of Hartford Seminary, has a particular interest in the Ḥadīth literature of Islam, from the standpoint of its nature as oral expression. His doctoral dissertation and several subsequent journal articles have treated various aspects of the Ḥadīth. Most recently he has been working on rhetorical analysis of that material.
Saad A. Sowayan
Saad Abdullah Sowayan is Professor of Anthropology and Folklore at King Saud University. He has published articles in Arabic and English on the oral literature and spoken language of the Arabian nomads. His major works in English are Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia (1985) and The Arabian Oral Historical Narrative: An Ethnographic and Linguistic Analysis (1992).
Dirghām H. Sbait
Ḍirgham Ḥ. Sbait of Portland State University is a researcher of contemporary Arabic poetry, oral Arabic poetry, folk songs, and folk proverbs. He is an expert on the improvised-sung colloquial poetry of the Palestinian poet-singers, with special emphasis on the analysis of genres, techniques of improvisation, and the sociocultural context of the poetic texts.
George D. Sawa
George D. Sawa studied music at the Higher Institute for the Studies of Arabic Music in Alexandria, Egypt between 1966 and 1970, and received his Ph.D. in 1983 from the University of Toronto. He as a joint appointment at the Department of Music and Department of Middle East and Islamic Studies at Toronto, where he teaches the history of Arabic music.
Dwight F. Reynolds
Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Egyptian Oral Epic Tradition (1995) and Arab Folklore (2007), co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), and co-editor of The Garland Encyclopedia of Word Music: The Middle East (2002).
H.T. Norris
Harry Norris, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, teaches a course unit on Arabic popular literature to undergraduates. He has published a study of Sīrat cAntar and has recorded Exeter University Tape, A 961, on this literature. He has participated in conferences in Cairo, Dublin, and Tunisia.
James T. Monroe
James T. Monroe teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written several books and even more articles on medieval Arabic literature, ranging from Pre-Islamic poetry to the maqāmāt, while specializing in the literature of Arab Spain, which he studies from a comparative perspective that takes into account the native Romance tradition.
Henry Massie
Henry N. Massie, M.D. directs the child psychiatry training program at St. Mary’s Hospital, San Francisco, and is on the faculty of the University of California School of Medicine. He has done cross-cultural studies of mother-child interaction in North Africa, Bali, and the United States. He is the author of Childhood Psychosis in the First Four Years of Life (1984).
Bridget Connelly
Bridget Connelly (Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley) studies Arabic, medieval French, and English oral traditions. She is the author of Arab Folk Epic and Identity, which analyzes the rhetorical, performance dynamic of the living migration epic, Sīrat Banī Hilāl, in Egypt, the Maghreb, the Sudan, and the Chad region.
Muhsin Mahdi
Muhsin Mahdi is James Richard Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard University. His most recent work is The Thousand and One Nights (Alf Layla wa-Layla) from the Earliest Known Sources, published by E. J. Brill, Leiden. The third volume of this work, which deals with the history of the text, is in preparation.
Simon Jargy
Simon Jargy is Chairman of the Arabic and Islamic Studies department at the Faculty of Arts, University of Geneva. Since the 1950’s, he has recorded a large amount of oral poetry and songs, mostly Bedouin, all over the Arab Near East. He has published La poésie populaire traditionnelle chantée au Proche-Orient arabe (Paris: Mouton, 1970), La musique arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2nd ed., 1977; 3rd ed. forthcoming), and many articles dealing with ethnomusicology and Arab oral poetry.
Adnan Haydar
Adnan F. Haydar (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) has lectured and published studies on the applicability of Parry’s and Lord’s theories to classical and modern Arabic poetry. His forthcoming book, The Metrics of Lebanese Zajal Poetry, highlights the relationship between musical and poetic meter and studies the rhetorical strategies used in verbal dueling.
Frederick M. Denny
Frederick M. Denny teaches Islamic studies and the history of religions at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has conducted fi eld research on Qur’ān recitation and related matters in Egypt and Indonesia. His book, An Introduction to Islam, is used widely in North American college courses. He has published numerous articles on various aspects of Qur’ānic studies.
Dwight F. Reynolds
Dwight F. Reynolds is professor of Arabic language and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Egyptian Oral Epic Tradition (1995) and Arab Folklore (2007), co-author and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (2001), and co-editor of The Garland Encyclopedia of Word Music: The Middle East (2002).
Teirab AshShareef
Teirab AshShareef is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Minnesota. He conducted fieldwork among the Banī Halba of the Sudan. His research interests include contemporary Arabic oral and written literature, Arabic-European and American literary relations, and literary theory and criticism.
