Cristina LA ROSA

Brief Academic Profile

University of Catania Cristina La Rosa is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Catania, where she has been teaching in undergraduate and graduate degree programmes since 2014. Her research mainly focuses on Sicilian Arabic in a comparative perspective with the Arabic of al-Andalus and Malta, the Arabic-Sicilian and Andalusi grammatical tradition, Tunisian Arabic dialectology and sociolinguistics, and Maghrebi popular poetry. She is the author of the monograph L’arabo di Sicilia nel contesto maghrebino: nuove prospettive di ricerca, published by the Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino (series La Sicilia islamica: testi, ricerche letterarie e linguistiche, edited by Mirella Cassarino, vol. 1, July 2019), as well as several articles and essays on these subjects.

From 2017 to January 2020, she served as Secretary of the Società per gli Studi sul Medio Oriente (SeSaMO). She is a member of several international scholarly associations, including the Union Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants (UEAI), the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA), the Association Internationale sur le Moyen Arabe (AIMA), and the Association Derja, as well as research centres and groups such as the Centro di ricerca per gli Studi sul Mondo Islamico Contemporaneo e l’Africa (CoSMICA) and the Groupe International de Recherche sur l’Arabe de Sicile (GIRAS). She also serves on the editorial boards of the series La Sicilia islamica: testi, ricerche letterarie e linguistiche published by the Istituto per l’Oriente Carlo Alfonso Nallino, I grandi libri della letteratura araba (Edizioni Ca’ Foscari), and Estudios de dialectología árabe published by University of Zaragoza Press.

She has presented papers at numerous international conferences and has promoted and coordinated several scholarly initiatives, some of them organised in collaboration with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Study Days “Circulation and Transmission of Grammatical Knowledge between Sicily and al-Andalus”, Catania, 4–5 April 2017, and Venice, 15–16 November 2017) and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (panel “Three Coasts, Three Languages: Trends in Arabic Linguistic Studies in the Islamic West (al-Andalus, Sicily, North Africa)”, 5th World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, Seville, 16–22 July 2018). From the academic year 2016/2017 to 2024/2025, she coordinated the university seminar series Conoscere il mondo islamico (“Understanding the Islamic World”). She is currently organising the 16th Conference of the Association Internationale de Dialectologie Arabe (AIDA), to be held at DISUM, Catania, from 23 to 26 June 2026.

Member of the international project  "The Language of Arabic Manuscripts: Non-Classical Varieties of Written Arabic in the Islamic West (LAM)", funded by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades,  by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación, and co-funded by the European Union, Principal Investigator: Estefanía Valenzuela Mochón (CSIC; Granada).

The LAM project originates from a desire to better understand the history of the Arabic language in the Islamic West. Since its arrival in the 7th century,
Arabic became a key language in a vast literary and cultural tradition, transmitting scientific knowledge that remains relevant today. However, despite its
prominence and the regions rich premodern textual production, the historical evolution of written Arabic in the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa remains
largely unknown.
Traditionally, Classical Arabic has been viewed as the standard literary form through which this written tradition was transmitted. Yet, premodern
Western Arabic texts reveal linguistic features that deviate from prescriptive norms. These non-classical forms have often been dismissed or corrected in
edited texts, reinforcing the conventional idea of linguistic uniformity. As a result, traditional scholarship presents an incomplete picture, overlooking the
actual linguistic diversity found in original sources.
LAM challenges this view by proposing that non-classical written Arabic was more prevalent in the Islamic West than previously assumed. Just as
scholars have documented Middle Arabic in Eastern texts, growing research (Lentin, 2008; Francisco, 2024; García Arévalo, 2022; Guerrero Parrado,
2022; Turner, 2022; Valenzuela Mochón, 2023, 2024; Larbi, 2024; De la Rosa, 2024) provides compelling evidence that premodern Arabic-speaking
societies in the West also produced texts that did not always adhere to classical norms.
To investigate this, LAM proposes two main initiatives:
1.    Compiling a robust corpus of premodern non-classical Arabic texts to analyze their linguistic features.
2.    Creating an open-access database documenting these texts with systematic linguistic descriptions and genre classifications.
By doing so, LAM seeks to advance our knowledge of written Arabic in Western territories up to the 20th century, offering a more nuanced perspective
on Arabics historical evolution. This research has the potential to reshape how Arabic historical (socio)linguistics is approached, not just in the Islamic
West, but across the broader Arabic-speaking world. Ultimately, LAM aims to establish a more inclusive interpretation of Arabics history, recognizing
both classical and non-classical varieties as legitimate forms of expression in premodern societies. To achieve this, it returns to the original Arabic
documents, which have long been overlooked.