Much scholarship on classical Arabic-Islamic texts has been preoccupied with demarcating the “serious” from the “humorous.” In the former category fall complex poetic explorations of nostalgia or romantic torment, as well as works deemed primarily “religious” that have bearing on matters of the mind and soul. In the latter category, they find popular literature, works that, while usually intended to educate or produce moral realizations along with laughs, are comparatively less intellectually sophisticated. Biographical material, too, tends to be looked on as juxtaposing “serious” information (where a given author lived, their political and religious alignments, their scholarly credentials) with light and entertaining akhbār (anecdotes) the value of which is primarily to add humorous human interest touches to the “more substantial” scaffolding of a life story. However, when the organizers pierce into the tradition, these demarcations struggle to hold water: no text is either fundamentally humorous or fundamentally serious. What might it mean, instead, to take humor seriously as an intellectual and discursive medium?

We are delighted to invite submissions for this conference on Serious Laughter, which seeks to create a network of early-career scholars who can bring their diverse interests and specializations to bear in thinking the classical Arabic-Islamic textual world—and the lives of those who shaped it—beyond a “humorous-serious” binary.

We welcome contributions from scholars working on the following questions, among many others:

• humor and comedy in classical Arabic poetry and prose of all periods and genres
• performativity and humor on and off the page: comedy in the social world, the musical and visual arts, and material culture
• moments of humor in texts from the various Islamic ‘ulūm
• the role of the humorous in the making of life stories (biographical and historiographical texts)

The conference will take place in two stages, the first at KCL in London on June 18-20, 2025, and the second at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York on October 16–17, 2025. This design aims to maximize junior scholars’ opportunities to receive and incorporate feedback, modelling a collaborative culture of scholarship in which individual interventions are genuinely formed in conversation with other participants. Thus, willingness/ability to attend both stages is a requirement for participation. (We are of course willing to be flexible about this requirement in the case of scholars for whom visa requirements pose additional challenges, especially those based in the Middle East, whose contributions and participation they are eager to enable. The organizers have a small pot of limited funds that they will use to provide bursaries to scholars able to attend both meetings).

Each panelist will present a paper related to the conference theme of Serious Laughter at the June meeting in London; they will then rework this paper to present again to both conference participants and a larger group of Cornell faculty and students in October. They request right of first refusal for panelists’ papers, which will be collected in an edited volume.

If you are interested, please send an abstract to betty.rosen@kcl.ac.uk by February 1, 2025.