As part of the series “Seven Women Speak of Al-Andalus,” Professor Laila M. Jreis-Navarro, from the University of Zaragoza, will give a lecture on Wednesday, June 3, entitled “Al-Andalus in the First Person: Voices, Writings, and Emotional Spaces,” about the evolution of first-person written expression in the Andalusian period. The event will take place on June 3 at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium of Casa Árabe in Córdoba (9 Samuel de los Santos Gener Street). Admission is free until the auditorium reaches capacity. The lecture will be given in Spanish.
In the Andalusian Arabic textual legacy, first-person expression did not have a conventional place, since the Arab-Islamic tradition and pre-modern traditions in general did not have specific genres for writing about the self. This leads to the idea that individual and intimate expression is exclusive to modern beings, hindering the perception of forms of personal expression different from those familiar to us, as well as the understanding of Andalusian works that, in a certain sense, engage with our current readings of self-expression.
In this talk, Professor Jreis-Navarro will discuss the evolution of first-person expression in al-Andalus, showing its relationship to certain turning points throughout its historical development. She will present individuals who, with their intimate voices, broke with conventional spaces and demonstrate how they created new textual spaces for emotional expression.
Laila M. Jreis-Navarro is a tenured professor in the Department of Linguistics and Hispanic Literatures at the University of Zaragoza and a member of the Clarisel group at the Institute of Heritage and Humanities of the same institution. Her research focuses on the study of subjective expression in the Andalusian Arabic textual legacy through the analysis of its writing genres and linguistic encoding. Among her recent works is the editing of the collective volume Nasrid Emotions: The Chronicle of a Transition (CSIC Publishing House, 2025). https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4455-4745.
