Bio
Hilary Kilpatrick obtained her DPhil from Oxford with a thesis on the Egyptian novel. She has taught at universities in the UK, the Netherlands, the USA and Switzerland and is now an independent scholar working in Lausanne. Her interests have shifted over the years first to classical Arabic literature and more recently to Arabic literature of the Ottoman period. She held a Humboldt-Stiftung Fellowship in 1975-76 and a research grant from the Fonds national suisse de la recherche scientifique in 1989-90 and 1991-1993.
Research project
Her project at the OIB on an edition and study of the poetry of Nīqūlāwus al-Ṣā’igh (1692-1756) carries forward her interest in this important literary and ecclesiastical personality of the first half of the 18th century. Although his Dīwān was printed in Beirut some six times between 1859 and 1910, no information is available about the manuscripts the editions are based on. They almost certainly ignored witnesses from places as far afield as St. Petersburg, Birmingham and Konya. The first part of the project is to make an inventory of the mss in Lebanon and elsewhere and identify the main types so as to undertake a scholarly edition. The second part is to study the poems, tracing the various sources on which they draw: the poet’s own life, the common Arabic literary heritage, the Byzantine hymnographic tradition, counter-Reformation spirituality and specifically Muslim genres. The results of this study will add greatly to understanding of Arabic poetry especially by Christians in the pre-nahḍa.
