Hayyim Vital was a Jewish mystic (kabbalist) who lived in Safed, Israel in the sixteenth-century. This dissertation examines the implications of Vital's concept of “the oral and the written.” Informed by research in the field of linguistic anthropology, I look at how Vital's vie…
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This dissertation shows how the performance of oral expressive forms represents and construes reality in the Wakhi community of northern Pakistan. It emphasizes the role of contextual reference to the physical, social, and cultural environment in studying how the interpretive pa…
Continuous Curatorial Conversations is a practice-led exploration of conversation, both as a medium and as a tool for capturing supplementary histories of the curatorial. The primary question of this research project is how the medium of conversation can be explored to write sup…
My dissertation explores the changing status of objects and architecture in Mali through an examination of three case studies: the traditional sculpture of the Bamana Jo society, the Musée National du Mali, and the historic site of Hamdallaye, the 19th century capital of the Isl…
My work in Comparative Literary Studies and French explores the link between the Mande oral tradition and its literature to reveal the presence and absence of the griots' words and their portrayal in the novel. Authors Amadou Hampaté Bâ (L'Étrange Destin de Wangrin ); Massa Maka…
In the developing world, critical information, such as in the field of healthcare, can often mean the difference between life and death. While information and communications technologies enable multiple mechanisms for information access by literate users, there are limited optio…
Orality or Literature? That was the question that led to this dissertation. The central topic around which that project was generated is the epic stories sung by griots like Djéliba Badjé and Djado Sékou. Though this was just the tip of the iceberg, it became obvious from listen…
The literary lecture is a subgenre of the traditional academic lecture that combines literary and metaliterary analysis, artistic self-fashioning, and public performance. This study considers the literary lectures of five writers as a sampling of a major transformation in this g…
Sixteenth-century Italy is rich in considerations on the frightening power of song and women’s voices. Looking back to classical sources on sirens, enchantresses, and the power of the ancient modes; consolidating ideas about the body and the world in the burgeoning field of natu…
This study, using qualitative inquiry, explores the perceptions of Romanian theology students using primarily oral-based teaching methods, such as Bible storying and drama. The use of such methods in theological education is well-documented among low literate cultures, yet less …
Based on a variety of largely unutilized printed, as well as documentary and manuscript sources collected from archives in the Middle East, North Africa, India and Europe, this dissertation is a longue durée study of the evolution of the conception and function of hadith transmi…