Scholar Spotlight: Professor Marie Huber

Professor Huber, we are so pleased to host you as our Abbasi Faculty affiliate spotlight this month. Tell us about your current research trajectory and what questions excite you the most.

Over the past couple of years I have been drawn more and more to questions of poetic performance and the interconnections of poetry and song. In some ways, one could say that I am returning to my professional roots as a musician.

I’ll be on Junior Leave in 2022-23 and hope to spend the year working on a monograph with the provisional title Infinite Events: Poetry, Music, and Spiritual Practice in the Shadow of Sheykh Ahmad-e Jam. My project sets out to trace how poems are performed to music and understood as part of the spiritual practice of the Mojaddedi Naqshbandi Sufi order centred around the shrine of Sheykh Aḥmad-e Jām (1048-1141) in Torbat-e Jām, Khorāsān, Iran. The practice of the Sufi bards defies the modern notion that poetic texts can be separated from the matrix uniting poet, singer, and audience in a ritual of performance where poem, music, and ethics become an indivisible whole. Music here is an essential and formative element of a performance that is at once poetic and spiritual; it also creates an event on which the temporal relation of disciple and guide can be founded.

In what ways does your work on Persian poetics intersect with the field of Islamic Studies?

This is one of the questions that I will be addressing in my new book. The literary – to use a modern concept – aspects of the poems sung by the dotāri bards cannot be divorced from the Islamic ethics on which their performative practice is founded.

Your 2016 book, In Memories of an Impossible Future: Mehdi Akhavān Sāles and the Poetics of Time you trace the quest for a modern language of poetry through different figurations of temporality. What was your favorite aspect while working on this book?

The luxury of spending two years reading and thinking about a poet whose work I believe to be outstanding. It takes patience and the ability to sit in silence before a poem begins to open up, so time is the most precious resource for a scholar working on poetry. I am infinitely grateful for those silent spaces of suspended time from which my book could emerge. 

What courses are you teaching in Spring ’22?

I am teaching two courses that I feel quite passionate about. One is “Songs of Love and Longing,” which will take students on a musical and poetic journey from the Balkans to South Asia. The other course is “Persian Poetry: Text, Space and Image;” I am co-teaching with Ala Ebtekar, which for me is a dream come true. I admire Ala’s work and am excited to see how we can talk about poems from a millennial tradition in ways that combine the lived approach of art with the analytical retrospection of scholarly research.

What do you wish more people knew about your work?

I hope that my work can lead people to the poems – and singers – I write about.