Abstract: At the end of the 1650s, Melchiorre Cafà, a Maltese sculptor, was newly established in Rome. Rome was the most significant site for sculptural production in Europe at that time. It was also a Golden Age of sculpture as artists vied for papal commissions and pushed the limits of their medium. They transformed hard...
The UCLA Medieval Texts Reading Group welcomes undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty interested in medieval literature. On the third Friday of each term, we get together to discuss a text in English translation from across the Global Middle Ages, to think about what it tells us about its cultural and literary context. Each discussion will be...
"Between Two Worlds: The Roma and Early Global Print Cultures" Guest Speaker: Kristina Richardson (University of Virginia) Richardson will show that Roma and other traveling people not only blocked printing between 800 and 1450 in North Africa and West Asia, but as they migrated into central Europe in the 1410s, they introduced print technology in...
Organizers: Stefania Tutino (UCLA), Andrea Robiglio (KU Leuven), and Eva Del Soldato (UPenn) The question of how knowledge transfers has become central for understanding the culture of the premodern world in a global perspective. This workshop is interested in exploring the question of what happens when transfer fails: what happens when knowledge is not “translated”...
This session is with Assistant Professor Lamia Balafrej (Art History). These workshops aim to provide quality feedback on a first full draft of a pre-tenure book manuscript in preparation for publication. Workshop participants are faculty members and doctoral graduate students selected by the author of the book manuscript. This is a continuing series, and junior...
Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and...
Striving for Expertise Guest Speaker: Carla Pestana (UCLA) Scholars often refer to Samuel Pepys as an early example of a state bureaucrat, his career as a civil servant in the burgeoning Restoration bureaucracy offering documentation of an important shift in governance. Of equal note—and perhaps greater interest—is the way Pepys himself aimed for expertise. Not...
Participation in the Seminar consists of group discussion of pre-circulated papers, typically drafts of articles, book chapters, or dissertation chapters (with complete apparatus). Two of the papers are ordinarily by emerging scholars (including PhD students) and the other two are by established scholars. We allocate one hour per paper and presenters should anticipate substantial, and...
Organizers: Sixiang Wang & Choon Hwee Koh
To mark 650 years since Boccaccio’s death, a conference on Boccaccio’s Other Wor(l)ds invites exploration of Boccaccio’s “Other Words” and “Other Worlds.” Boccaccio’s narratives—not limited to the Decameron—vividly depict cultural and intellectual exchanges, emphasizing human behavior, morality, and societal complexities across the Mediterranean and beyond, including Cathay. In the Decameron, the Levant serves as a crucial geographical and cultural...
Organizers: Stefania Tutino and Greg Woolf
Organizer: Basil Price
