Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is hosting a week-long masterclass for graduate students at Yale and selected graduate students from other universities to impart the skills and knowledge needed to conduct original research using Arabic manuscripts. Jointly sponsored by the Beinecke, the Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the YUSRIA initiative of the MacMillan Center Council on Middle East Studies, this course will feature an eminent guest instructor along with Yale professors to introduce the fundamentals of Arabic palaeography, codicology, and textual criticism. Students completing the course will be prepared for and oriented to further research in hitherto untapped manuscript sources. The Beinecke holds the third largest collection of Arabic manuscripts in the United States, many of which have never been consulted by scholars for research. Class will take place May 28-31, 2019.

Students will be provided with a copy of Professor Déroche's book, Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in the Arabic Script (2006).

The class will be taught by François Déroche, Professor at the Collège de France. He is the world's foremost authority on early Qur'an manuscripts and a leading scholar of the history of the Arabic book. His many publications include Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in the Arabic Script (2006), Qur'ans of the Umayyads (2014), and Le transmission écrite du Coran dans Jes débuts de l'lslam: le codex Parisino-Petropolitanus (2009), among many others. His work has done much to clarify how the Qur'an text was first transmitted, and has established a categorization of the earliest manuscripts dating to the seventh and eighth centuries CE.

Additional instruction will be provided by Kevin van Bladel, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations.