Tuesday 4 September 2012

Call for Proposals: Yale UP translation project

Seen on Twitter:

Dear colleagues,

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce a new project I am coordinating through Yale University Press and to invite proposals for translations.

Our series “World Thought in Translation,” supported by a major grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, will make important works of political, legal, social and ethical thought available in English translation. Its focus will be on previously untranslated texts from outside European traditions, particularly the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, South Asia, China, East Asia, and Africa, but the series will also be open to important but under-studied works originally written in European languages, particularly from Russia, Eastern Europe and Latin America.
The series will embrace both pre-modern and modern classics. Our primary criteria are the enduring influence of the texts for political and social debate and their unavailability to a wide English-speaking audience. We thus intend to fill the most urgent gaps faced by faculty seeking to teach courses on the political thought of non-Western societies. Given that the works in question will be unfamiliar to students, the translations will be accompanied by interpretive and analytic essays to give readers a basic introduction to the texts’ backgrounds, the circumstances in which they were written, and their subsequent influence within and outside their cultures.

These books are intended to be useful to faculty and students not only in political science departments but also in such fields as anthropology, history, religious studies, area studies and law. Some of the works are expected to reach a sizeable popular audience beyond the university.

We already have a number of projects in the pipeline, including translations of Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi’s (d. 1285) Al-Ihkam fi Tamyiz al-Fatawa ʿan al-Ahkam wa Tasarrufat al-Qadi wa-l-Imam (translator: Mohammed Fadel, Toronto) and Muhammad Rashid Rida’s Al-Khilafah aw al-Imamah al-‘Uzma (translator: Simon Wood). We are also considering proposals to translate Rashid al-Ghannushi’s al-Hurriyat al-’amma fi’l-dawla al-islamiyya, al-Raghib al-Isfahani’s K. al-dhari’a ila makarim al-shari’a and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Mizan al-’amal.

I would like to invite members of this scholarly community to submit proposals for collaboration. We take a wide view of what would make a valuable contribution, and are interested in proposals from all languages of the Muslim world. We are open to all kinds of proposals from any time period, any country, any language and any intellectual persuasion from the broader Islamic world.

Please address all queries to me at andrew.march at yale.edu.

Best wishes,
Andrew

Andrew F. March
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Yale University
http://www.yale.edu/polisci/people/amarch.html

No comments: