2025 William A. Brown Lecture
Speaker: Mauro Nobili
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm CST
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
(This in-person event was livestreamed) Click here to watch recording
Talk Description
William A. Brown is widely recognized as a remarkable and eclectic scholar. Yet, his role as a meticulous collector of primary sources remains underappreciated. During three missions in Mali (1966, 1967, 1968), he microfilmed hundreds of Arabic manuscripts that formed what I have elsewhere labeled as the William A. Brown “hidden” collection (Nobili & Bousbina 2024). Comprising 5 reels, this collection was incorporated later in the Malian Arabic Manuscript Microfilming Project and is now preserved in digital format at the Center for Research Library. In this talk, I will briefly present Brown’s missions in West Africa in search of Arabic manuscripts and then display some of the contents of his “hidden” collection. I will do so by showcasing some of these documents that are crucial from my book project titled Timbuktu, the Queen of England, and the French Invasion of the Sahara. This project is a microhistory of an imperial encounter that took place in the Niger Bend in the 1850s, shedding light on the agendas of a local scholar-cum-political leader named Aḥmad al-Bakkāy (d. 1864) in the face of European imperialism.
Speaker’s Bio
Mauro Nobili is a Full Professor of History at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He is a historian of pre-colonial and early colonial West Africa. His research examines the political and intellectual history of Muslim societies in the region from the late Middle Ages to the early colonial period. He is the author of several publications that appeared in journals such as History in Africa and the Journal of African History, of book chapters, two edited volumes, and three monographs. His latest book, co-authored Zachary V. Wright and Ali H. Diakite, is Chronicles of Two West African Kingdoms: The Tārīkh Ibn Al-Mukhtār of the Songhay Empire and the Tārīkh al-Fattāsh of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi (British Academy 2025).
The event is free and open to the public.