Letter Writing & Language Learning: a Case-Study from 18th C Morocco

Presenter: Peter Kitlas (Emory University)

Discussant: Tunç Şen (Columbia University)

Moderator: Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)

Throughout his career as a Viennese ‘language boy,’ Franz von Dombay (d. 1810) collected hundreds of personal letters, which he collated in several scrapbooks. While past scholars have done much work to demonstrate the ways in which Dombay excelled in his service across Morocco and the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth century, this talk focuses on the pedagogical techniques and practices of his Moroccan teacher, Ḥasan al-Wāfalāwī.