Department of English

• Monday, October 27, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

We look forward to welcoming Josh Mugler (Hill Museum & Manuscript Library) for a talk titled “Manuscripts and Violence in Modern Mesopotamia."

Dr. Mugler writes:

“In much of Southwest Asia, manuscript culture remained active and prolific long after it was mostly replaced by print in Western Europe and North America. Manuscript production among Christian communities in remote parts of Mesopotamia continued well into the twentieth century, and a few manuscripts have been produced there even in recent decades. Many of these are unpublished and unstudied, yet they are valuable witnesses to the violent convulsions that have reshaped this region in recent centuries. This presentation will explore the manuscript collections digitized and microfilmed by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML), both as written records of violence and as casualties of violence themselves. From the border wars of the eighteenth century, to firsthand accounts of World War I and its Armenian and Assyrian genocides, to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and the conquests of ISIS in 2014, manuscripts have been present throughout the modern history of this region. Many remain in the care of the communities that have suffered the most from this violence and who have made their heritage available to the world today.”

Josh Mugler joined the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) as a cataloger of Arabic and Syriac manuscripts in 2018. He now holds the position of Curator of Eastern Christian and Islamic Manuscripts. Mugler catalogs manuscripts from both traditions, manages HMML’s relevant digital and microfilm collections, and supervises a team of catalogers working across numerous languages and manuscript cultures on hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from libraries around the world. He holds a Master of Theological Studies degree from Harvard Divinity School and completed his PhD in Theological and Religious Studies in 2019 at Georgetown University, where his research focused on Christian-Muslim relations in tenth- and eleventh-century Syria. He has published on various aspects of the history of Christian-Muslim relations, including an edition and translation of the Arabic Life of Christopher that was the subject of his dissertation.