The Love Language of Plants: Stories of Becoming Written by a Human and Her Plants

Peter Webb is a University Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University. He researches Arabic literature, cultural production, communal identity, and the history of the Hajj in the pre-modern Middle East. The origins and evolution of Arab identity were the subject of both his book Imagining the Arabs: Arab Identity and the Rise of Islam (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), and his first contribution to the Library of Arabic Literature: The Excellence of the Arabs (with James Montgomery and Sarah Savant). His recent publications, including The Genius of Invective and a critical edition and translation of al-Maqrīzī's The Arab Thieves (Brill, 2019), are part of a larger project studying how Muslims memorialized, mythologized, and recounted the pre-Islamic past. His current research project is a wide-ranging reinvestigation of pre-Islamic poetry in its Arabian geographical and historical context. Prior to his academic career, Peter was a solicitor at Clifford Chance LLP.