The sensory turn in many areas of the humanities has failed to make a significant impression on Islamic and Middle East Studies, and on the study of Islamic history in particular. In the last couple of years, however, there has been a rise in interest in historical manifestations of the Muslim sensorium. This is demonstrated...
A lecture by Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University). Ecclesiastical history began in the 1550s, when the Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus organized a collaborative century-by-century history of Christianity. This confessional project never reached completion, and its thick volumes met with severe criticism from co-religionists as well as Catholics. Nonetheless, it provided a new model for the...
The Annual Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture In the late third and fourth centuries, a number of men and women from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria chose to make a daring break with society, renouncing their familial claims and wealth so that they could lead a life of perfection in the desert....
Erin Kathleen Rowe (Vice Dean for Undergraduate Education, Professor of History, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Johns Hopkins University) will give a talk about African and Black saints in early modern Iberia. Beginning in the seventeenth-century, members of the Carmelite order adopted two ancient Ethiopian saints, Efigenia and Elesban. While their interest in ancient...
Postponed -- to be re-scheduled. Ilse Sturkenboom (Art History, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich)
Professor Christian Keime (Classics, University of Cambridge) gives a public lecture, part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar for Winter 2023, “Historicity. Re-reading Michel Foucault,” taught by UCLA Professor Giulia Sissa. Join on Zoom at https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95860364810?pwd=VTJJY2oyS1YyLy9KNTB5TFZXRWhKQT09 Password: Plato
This is the first of the Games and Korean History webinar series in Winter 2023, presented by Chosŏn History Society and hosted by the UCLA Center for Korean Studies. This series brings together game creators, history teachers and scholars, and the gaming community through discussions over Korean history and its simulation. Dr. Álvaro Sanz from Paradox...
Professor Sara Brill (Philosophy, Fairfield University) gives a public lecture, part of the CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar for Winter 2023, “Historicity. Re-reading Michel Foucault,” taught by UCLA Professor Giulia Sissa. In Foucault’s later engagement with Greek antiquity, the concept of bios finds revolutionary force less in its usefulness to a notion of biopolitics (in bio-) than...
“Silver: Mutability and Materiality across Seventeenth-Century Networks of Trade and Plunder in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans” Nancy Um (Associate Director, Research and Knowledge Creation, Getty Research Institute) This talk delves into the circulation of silver in the late seventeenth century, a time when the silver streams of Potosi fueled the global maritime trade. It...
In most of the older studies of the Renaissance, Eastern Central Europe was a “dark area” about which very little was said. We have since come a long way in understanding 15th-century culture in Hungary, Slavonia and Croatia. A thriving Renaissance movement was spreading, and its focal point was Bishop John Vitez, a generous patron...
As the theater of engagement and integration of communities originating on the shores or from the hinterlands of Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Mediterranean region served as a dynamic center of interaction and exchange from Antiquity through early modernity. Even as it began to lose political and economic centrality, it has remained a zone of...
"On the Introduction of Chinese Decorated Paper to Iran and How it Revolutionized Manuscript Production in the Islamic World" Guest speaker: Ilse Sturkenboom (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) The fifteenth-century introduction of long sheets of brightly colored and gold-embellished paper from Ming China to Iran provided book artists with a range of new possibilities in the production of...
Copy of Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (Complete map of the world), 1674, Ferdinand Verbiest, S.J. held at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Image stitched together from individual images of each frame of the map screen. Guest Speaker: S.E. Kile (University of Michigan) "Was the World Early Modern?: Telescopes, Surgery, and Print Media in China,...
This lecture takes up questions in African Medieval to Early Modern ivory imagery and sources framed in part around a set of seemingly anomalous motifs that address how power and ivory have mutually shaped each other both in Africa (particularly Nigeria) and in European contexts. Among the works taken up are images of elephants in...
Abstract: The ideal of "death for the fatherland" (Pro patria mori) may seem to be an invariable reality of human society, from Sparta and Athens to today's wars. In fact, it is a political imaginary whose periodization can be traced. Ernst Kantorowicz, in a famous article published in 1951, proposed an analysis of this problem....
