The 2025 Annual Meeting

The BSA Officers and members of the Council warmly invite you to attend the Society’s Annual Meeting on 24 January 2025! Scroll down for complete program details. Register by 15 January 2025.

Title page of the Kitab al-fihrist.

Ibn al-Nadim, Kitab al-fihrist (Baghdad, 987-1000). Chester Beatty Library.

About the Annual Meeting ↑

The BSA Annual Meeting features the New Scholars Program, a keynote lecture, and for the first time, synchronous panel presentations in the morning. Details about the New Scholars program will be shared in November 2024.

Registration for the Annual Meeting is required, opening November 2024.

Ahmed El Shamsy, Professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago.

The 2025 Keynote by Dr. Ahmed El Shamsy ↑

Bibliography after Empire: Documenting and Classifying Knowledge in the Tenth-Century Muslim World

In the late tenth century, a Baghdadi bookseller by the name of Ibn al-Nadim embarked on the ambitious mission of compiling a comprehensive and systematic inventory of all books ever written in or translated into Arabic. By that time, the vast Islamic empire that had once stretched from Iberia to India had fragmented, but the shared cultural and intellectual space defined by the lingua franca of Arabic continued to flourish. What Ibn al-Nadim sought to produce, then, was a complete record of the knowledge available in his time. In his extensive introduction and his catalog of more than eight thousand books, Ibn al-Nadim offers us a glimpse into a knowledge economy that was still expanding even though the empire that had launched it no longer existed.

About the speaker: Ahmed El Shamsy is a professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He has published two books, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2013) and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (2020). He is now writing a book about the emergence and early history of Sunni Islam.

Detailed Program Schedule ↑

We warmly invite you to attend the full day’s events on 24 January. This year the program will start at 10 am with three synchronous panel presentations. The Editors of PBSA will host a brown-bag lunch session starting at noon, with the New Scholars program beginning at 1 pm.

Lunch for all attendees will be provided at no additional charge.

Details about the morning sessions and the New Scholars Program speakers will be announced in November 2024.

Schedule of Events, Friday, 24 January

  • 10 to 11:30 am, Activating Bibliographical Histories and Practices: synchronous panel and workshop sessions

  • 11:30 am to 1 pm, lunch

    • 12 to 1pm, PBSA brown bag session, “The Bibliographical Note Now & Then”

  • 1 to 2:30 pm, New Scholars Program

  • 2:30 to 3 pm, Coffee Break

  • 3 to 5 pm, Keynote Lecture and brief business meeting

  • 5 to 6:30 pm, Reception

New in 2025: Morning Sessions from 10 to 11:30 am ↑

The BSA Events Planning Sub-Committee invited our community of bookmakers and sellers, collectors, conservators, curators, educators, librarians, scholars, and students to submit proposals for a session centered on the myriad ways we activate bibliographical histories and practices. We are pleased to present the following panels during the morning session of the upcoming annual meeting.

Find a list of sessions schedule from 10 to 11:30 am below; full panel descriptions and speaker bios can be found in the News section of the website.

  • Book History on a Budget: A Maker-Centered Approach
    Lindsay DiCuirci, Jillian J. Sayre, & Sophia Westfall

  • Bridging the Gap: From Close-Looking to Structural Thinking
    Gina Hurley & Aaron T. Pratt

  • Look, Think, Wonder: An Adaptable Framework for Teaching with Primary Sources
    Erin Chiparo & Sarah McElroy Mitchell

Attendees will be asked to select one panel when they register for the meeting; doing so helps us ensure that we place panels in spaces large enough to accommodate the audience.

About the Meeting Venue: Location & Access ↑

The meeting will be held at Convene, 75 Rockefeller Center in New York City. Registration is required for attendance; all registrants will receive a QR code by email the evening before and the morning of the event for access to the event space. Should you have any concerns about security protocols in the building, please feel welcome to contact the BSA office by email at any time.

About our in-person program

This year’s program will be presented to our in-person audience only, with recordings of the New Scholars talks, the keynote lecture, and the business meeting made available on YouTube in February 2025. Sign up for our email newsletter to be the first to know when recordings have been released!

Health safety protocols