Ruins have for a long time captured the human imagination and, in one way or another, have been inscribed in a community's memory, history, or lore. This long-standing tradition concerning ruins be it real or imagined, ancient or modern ones has resulted in a multitude of reflections and creative interpretations. The discourse on ruins, steeped in tradition as it is, offers a unique vantage point to reflect upon their actual meaning in various societies and disciplines by focusing on how they have been and still are often (mis)used and employed in contemporary debates as powerful symbols and motifs. Tackling questions related to the genealogies, functions, and interpretations of ruins in literary and artistic, political and legal, philosophical and sociological discourses, this book aims at moving the discussion beyond the level of case studies. The contributors examine the perception of ruins and the discourse on decay, destruction, and reconstruction from various disciplinary perspectives, referring to a multitude of ruin-related concepts such as 'longing', 'memory', 'trauma', and 'identity'.

Enass Khansa is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, the Department of Arabic and Near Eastern Languages. Enass holds a PhD from Georgetown University, and was the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture, both at Harvard University. Enass works on premodern Arabic literature and is currently an editor at the Library of Arabic Literature (LAL) at NYU-Abu Dhabi. Konstantin Klein received his doctorate in ancient history from the University of Oxford and has been a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Visiting Junior Research Fellow at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (Kenyon Institute). Since 2011, he has worked as a lecturer at the department of Ancient History at the University of Bamberg. The main focus of his work is on the cultural history of the Near East in Graeco-Roman times, especially in Late Antiquity. Barbara Winckler is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Münster, and the co-director of the bilingual summer school program "Arabische Philologien im Blickwechsel" (Arabic-English; arabic-philologies.de). She studied at the universities of Aix-en-Provence, Cologne, Damascus, and Berlin and worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin. Her research interests cover modern and contemporary Arabic literature and arts (particularly war and post-war discourses in Lebanon), Arabic periodicals and cultural history of the Nahdah period, and recent developments in Arabic studies as an academic discipline.