Nadirah Mansour, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University

“An Intellectual History of the 19th Century Transition from Arabic Manuscript to Arabic Print” seeks to determine what intellectual trends shaped Arabic print across the Arabic-speaking world, from which books were printed and why they were printed to the advent of the Arabic-language newspaper. Mansour’s multidisciplinary approach will bring together Middle Eastern-North African history and Islamic studies as well as different genres of Arabic thought, from journalism to Muslim devotional texts, in an attempt to build a history of early Arabic mass print. The Mark Samuels Lasner Fellowship will be used to support a month-long trip to Rabat, Morocco, where Mansour will conduct research using the Rare Books Collection at Muhammad V University and the National Archives of Morocco.