Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of Medieval Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, affiliated with the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Princeton. Her work on global book history includes co-curating “Hidden Stories: Books Along the Silk Roads” at Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum. Her monographs are on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), with edited volumes on travel literature (Marco Polo) and Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), plus How We Write and How We Read from punctum books. She co-hosts a literature podcast called The Spouter-Inn.
Today I was at the Humboldt Forum for the first time—first time inside the doors, at least, since I had wandered around the outside of the building on the weekend. It is a strange building, at once a fifteenth-century palace (substantially enlarged in the seventeenth century) and a twenty-first-century simulacrum.
