Description:

Speaker

Shireen Hamza - History, Northwestern University

Title

"Down by the Water: Medicine and Religion in Waterside Spaces"

Abstract

Medieval stepwells and bathhouses, stunning and ornate structures that facilitated access to fresh water, still dot the landscape of the Middle east and South Asia. How were these and other waterside spaces crucial to life in the medieval period?  Water’s necessity to life is emphasized in the Quran and developed across many textual genres in these regions. And waterside spaces, built with patronage from elite women and men, were crucial for both the physical and ritual regulation of the body. Drawing together textual, architectural, and art historical sources as well as histories of science and religion, I examine the sensory and embodied experiences of these spaces. Medical and religious texts and practices help us understand the implications of these spaces for health and illness across the medieval Indian Ocean world. 

Biography

Shireen Hamza obtained her PhD from Harvard's Department of the History of Science in May 2023, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. She produces works in sound, movement, and other artistic media, alongside and in conversation with her scholarly publications. Shireen's work lives on the shores of the history of medicine, Islamic Studies, Indian Ocean History, and the history of sexuality. At Northwestern, they will be working on a book, Environment & Medicine in Medieval Islam, which draws on Arabic and Persian medical manuscripts from across the western Indian Ocean world to investigate the role of place and locality in knowledge production. Shireen will also begin work on her second book project about sound in medieval Islamic cities, interrogating the ways filmmakers in and beyond these regions have imagined their soundscapes in the last century.