Highlights from Georgetown Humanities Research from Spring 2024

Book Manuscript Workshop Grants

Professor Sara Omar, Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies

Professor Omar hosted a day-long workshop on her manuscript Sex Between Men in Early Muslim Discourses. Four leading scholars joined this workshop and contributed to its success: Marion Katz, Professor of Islamic Studies at New York University; Mohammad Fadel, Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto; Jonathan Brockopp, Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University; and Devin Stewart, Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Emory University. 

“The Humanities Initiative Junior Faculty Book Manuscript award not only enabled me to receive helpful feedback on my first book, prior to its publication, but more importantly, it has helped me build a meaningful relationship with some of the leading scholars in my field,” said Prof. Omar. “In addition to offering feedback on my manuscript, some of the scholars reviewed my CV and offered tailored advice on publishing and how to best prepare for tenure promotion. One scholar sent me a personal email praising Georgetown University for supporting their junior faculty through this award and initiative. I am extremely grateful for having received this award, which has allowed me to receive feedback for the first time on my monograph and has enabled me to build relationships that will undoubtedly open doors for future collaboration.” 

Prof. Elena Herburger, Department of Spanish and Portuguese

Prof. Elena Herburger organized a workshop on her book manuscript Conditionals in Natural Language – Conditionally So. The discussants were Professors Barry Schein from the University of Southern California, Sam Alxatib from the CUNY Graduate Center, and Paul Portner from Georgetown University.

Thanks in no small part to the comments she received from the workshop participants and the ensuing discussion, Prof. Herburger submitted the completed manuscript to the publisher and it will appear in Springer Nature as part of its “Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy (SLAP) Series.

Conditionally So deals with the semantics of conditional sentences, for example sentences like “If you go to Carol’s party, you’ll have a wonderful time” and “If they had had better intelligence, they would not have invaded.” The fact that conditionals allow us to express thoughts about hypothetical and even counterfactual circumstances makes them both important and challenging to analyze. Organized into eleven chapters, Conditionally So develops an analysis of the logical form of conditionals where they are seen to quantify about possible eventualities (rather than worlds) and where their interpretation tracks their grammatical structure rather closely. Topics that are discussed include the interaction of conditionals with adverbs of quantification, modals, and probability expressions, the way conditionals interact with negation, the locus and nature of the non-monoticity of conditionals, the semantics of then, and the difference between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals.

Scholars participating in Prof. Herburger’s workshop