Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo
Dipartimento di eccellenza 2023-2027

Acronym: DIGIMYTH

Researcher: Dr Arturo Monaco

Start date: 1 December 2022 

End date: 30 November 2025

Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01

Project Number: 101065808

EU Funding: € 282 046,08

Partner institutions/supervisors
Hosting Institution: Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), Department of History, Anthropology, Religions, Art History, and Performing Arts. Supervisor: Prof Marco Di Branco

Partner Institution: American University of Beirut (Lebanon), Department of English. Supervisor: Prof Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Partner Institution (Secondment): Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy), Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities. Supervisor: Prof Franz Fischer.

Project summary:

DIGIMYTH is an interdisciplinary project that adopts the tools of digital humanities (DH) in Arabic literary studies. It plans to create an open access database and a digital archive through which it investigates the dynamics of the reception of Greek myths in Arabic literature produced in Egypt and in the Mashreq in the period 1850-1950. Thanks to its intersectional approach that involves DH, literary studies, historical and religious studies, the project aims at having an impact both on Arabic literary studies and on other fields of research. The general objectives of DIGIMYTH are to investigate how, when and which Greek myths were introduced into modern Arabic literature and to evaluate their impact on its development. The project envisages two primary specific objectives:

1) The identification of modern Arabic literary texts containing references to Greek myths. This entails the collection and cataloguing of these texts in a database and after that the digitization, encoding and annotation of relevant key texts related to Greek myths, which will be collected in a digital archive.

2) The understanding of the dynamics of the reception of Greek myths in modern Arabic literature. The project will carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data collected in the database and the archive, resting on a methodology that mixes digital tools (mainly producing statistics) with literary, historical and religious studies.

The major accomplishment expected by the project is a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of classical receptions in the modern Arab context. While there are studies on the use of myth in Arabic poetry after 1948, they fail to determine the specific function of Greek myths, and to explain how these myths were integrated into the Arabic literary system before 1948. The project is expected to answer questions such as: when and which Greek myths were introduced in Arabic literature? Is there any relation between the place and the reception of a myth, and between the latter and politics and ideology? How did the meaning of the myth change over time and space?