Past Events

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies and Musa Sabi Chair in Iranian Studies, in collaboration with the Center for Near Eastern Studies and the Program on Central Asia, invite scholars and graduate students from across the world to participate in the following research program: From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series, which will take place via Zoom on a weekly basis between January and June 2022. The…

A lecture by CMRS-CEGS Associate Yonatan Binyam, President's Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. In this talk, Dr. Binyam reviews some of the objections against premodern race studies and clarifies some of the arguments, models, and approaches utilized in the field. More specifically, he presents race-making as a comparative category to analyze modes of social formation in antiquity, illustrating the value that premodern race studies hold for the study of…

RESCHEDULED FOR NOVEMBER 2022 In the past decades, there have been many studies devoted to aspects of medieval translation. For example, the conferences on The Medieval Translator, and the series of collective monographs resulting from them, illustrate the wealth of approaches that have shed light on this important topic. Clearly, the act of translating from one language into another was crucial in medieval culture. As an intellectual practice, translation finds its origins in the methods of Latin rhetoric, which fostered…

This session will discuss Geraldine Heng's "A Global Race in the European Imaginary: Native Americans in the North Atlantic," which is chapter 5 from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (the book's introduction is also provided in the link above as an optional reading). Open to UCLA Faculty and Graduate Students. Access the Reading Group Meeting Ground Rules here. Register for the meeting here. Questions? Contact memsa.ucla@gmail.com.

RESCHEDULED FOR  NOVEMBER 2022 In the past decades, there have been many studies devoted to aspects of medieval translation. For example, the conferences on The Medieval Translator, and the series of collective monographs resulting from them, illustrate the wealth of approaches that have shed light on this important topic. Clearly, the act of translating from one language into another was crucial in medieval culture. As an intellectual practice, translation finds its origins in the methods of Latin rhetoric, which fostered…

In The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, one of the most significant contributions on Dante’s thought in modern scholarship, Christian Moevs presents an interpretation of the Florentine poet’s worldview that is consistent with Eastern spirituality. Moevs’s allusions to non-dualistic principles of Indian and Asian religion and thought in the context of an in-depth examination of Dante’s metaphysics offer the opportunity to advance a productive inquiry that may bridge conventional divides between medieval literature in Europe and cultural productions in medieval East…

In The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, one of the most significant contributions on Dante’s thought in modern scholarship, Christian Moevs presents an interpretation of the Florentine poet’s worldview that is consistent with Eastern spirituality. Moevs’s allusions to non-dualistic principles of Indian and Asian religion and thought in the context of an in-depth examination of Dante’s metaphysics offer the opportunity to advance a productive inquiry that may bridge conventional divides between medieval literature in Europe and cultural productions in medieval East…

CMRS-CEGS / Comparative Literature Co-Sponsored Lecture Ayesha Ramachandran (Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University) "Petrarch’s African canzoniere: Lyric Anthropology and the Question of Race" Is the rhetoric of Petrarchan poetry a foundational discourse of early modern race-making? And what might it mean to investigate early modern lyric as site for reflection about race and cross-cultural difference? This talk returns to Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, often described as the urtext of modern lyric poetry, to reveal its textual and conceptual…

Junior Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop This is the first of a series of workshops that 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 book manuscript’s author. This is a continuing series and inquiries by junior faculty wishing to benefit are welcome. Please contact the Director, Zrinka Stahuljak. This session is with Assistant Professor SIXIANG WANG (Asian Languages…

The seminar meets to discuss four pre-distributed research papers  Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The following papers will be discussed at the seminar: Jessie Sherwood  (UC, Berkeley) "Converts in the Law: Rules and Norms for Baptism and Apostasy in the Early Middle…

This session will discuss Geraldine Heng's "A Global Race in the European Imaginary: Native Americans in the North Atlantic," which is chapter 5 from The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (the book's introduction is also provided in the link above as an optional reading). Open to UCLA Faculty and Graduate Students. Access the Reading Group Meeting Ground Rules here. Register for the meeting here. Questions? Contact memsa.ucla@gmail.com.  

Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Rescheduled from April 30, 2020. Please see event registration details below. Susan Phillips (English, Northwestern University). What happens when the schoolmaster is banished from the early modern classroom? The popular vernacular textbooks that flooded the European market in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries posed precisely this question when they claimed—on title pages and in prefatory material—not simply to stand in for the schoolmaster, but to displace him altogether. Most were practical how-to guides that offered entertaining dialogues…

Sponsored by MEMSA, the Race Reading Group takes place virtually and is open to UCLA faculty and graduate students. Chapter 4 from Michael Gomez's book African Dominion, "Slavery and Race Imagined in Bilād As-Sūdān" will be under discussion. Here is a link to the text. You can register to attend the Sept. 30 meeting here. The meeting dates for the rest of the quarter will be October 28 (week 5) and November 18 (week 8), all from 12-1 pm PT.…

We invite you to join us for the first meeting of the Medieval and Early Modern Student Association (MEMSA) and Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) co-sponsored Race Reading Group that will explore a variety of scholarly research on pre-modern race. The first meeting will be held virtually over Zoom on August 26, 2021. The group is open to UCLA students and faculty and meetings will focus on the discussion of one reading (an article or selections from a…

Graduate Student conference organized by the UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association (MEMSA). The global medieval and early modern world (broadly considered, ca. 900-1750) underwent myriad profound changes, from devastating famines, plagues, and wars to an increased entanglement of the continents, economic transformations, and technological and scientific developments. These changes were often accompanied by calls for the reshaping of the institutions and structures – political, religious, intellectual, etc. – which undergirded societies’ approach to these challenges, encompassing such responses…

New Book Salon Author Domenico Ingenito (Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) with discussants Lara Harb (Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University) and Marisa Galvez (Associate Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of German Studies, Stanford University) Beholding Beauty: Sa'di of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry, Brill, 2020. Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry explores the relationship between sexuality, politics, and…

CMRS Conference Organized by Giulia Sissa, Professor of Political Science and Classics, UCLA Virginity can be defined as a condition of sexual integrity, more specifically as the inexperience of full intercourse. This condition concerns mostly women before heterosexual coition. It involves corporeal, social, moral and emotional aspects. In modern Western anatomy, a thin piece of skin is allegedly located at the entrance of the vagina: its breakage is supposed to signify that penetration has occurred, whereas its integrity is supposed…

Watch this event on YouTube: Part 1, Part 2 CMRS Workshop organized and moderated by Lamia Balafrej, Assistant Professor, Arts of the Islamic World, UCLA Department of Art History. Slavery is often equated with archival lack and erasure, an assumption perhaps inherited from the study of the Atlantic slave trade but which might not hold for the premodern world. For one thing, in the medieval Mediterranean for example, people could slip in and out of the category of slavery—anyone could become a slave and…

Organized by Jean-Claude Carron (Research Professor, UCLA). This symposium convened to honor Michel Jeanneret (1940-March 2019) will memorialize the critical and creative achievements of one of the pillars of early modern studies today. We will bear witness to his pioneering contributions to the current critical discourse on French and European studies, covering both the ancient and nouveau régimes, from the Sixteenth century, with, among others, Vinci, Erasmus, Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, to Versailles, Nerval, and contemporary French cultural politics (« Cinquante-huit…

New Book Salon A discussion with Professor Anurima Banerji (UCLA, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance) and Professor Urmimala Sarkar (Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Art and Aesthetics) about Professor Banerji's recent book Dancing Odissi: Paratopic Performances of Gender and State, winner of the 2020 de la Torre Bueno Prize awarded by the Dance Studies Association. Click here to register on Zoom.

CMRS Symposium Is justice possible when foolishness runs rampant? Are folly and mockery valid means to restrain those who abuse power and thwart just treatment of the populace? This virtual conference, with presentations ranging from the high Middle Ages to the 20th century, will examine the social order reflected in the concepts of justice and its untidy, outspoken discontents—fools, scofflaws, even criminal figures. In the medieval and early modern periods, fools generally wore the mantle of outsider and rule-breaker; they…

CMRS Symposium Is justice possible when foolishness runs rampant? Are folly and mockery valid means to restrain those who abuse power and thwart just treatment of the populace? This virtual conference, with presentations ranging from the high Middle Ages to the 20th century, will examine the social order reflected in the concepts of justice and its untidy, outspoken discontents—fools, scofflaws, even criminal figures. In the medieval and early modern periods, fools generally wore the mantle of outsider and rule-breaker; they…

The seminar meets to discuss four pre-distributed research papers  Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. These are the papers under discussion which are available for download in advance of the seminar: Christopher Bacich  (Stanford University) “The Death of the Soul and the…

Annual Armand Hammer Art History Lecture Watch this lecture on YouTube. This lecture by Elizabeth Hill Boone (Art History, Tulane), focuses on the painted books of Aztec Mexico, sixteenth-century documents that some people consider to be works of Art and others consider to contain Writing.  The talk thus explores that place where our Western conceptions of Art and Writing come closest together. The Aztecs and their neighbors conceptualized writing and image-making as a single cultural category, one that involved a nonverbal system…

Professor Raphaëlle Burns, Department of French & Francophone Studies, UCLA “The Stories We Tell: Novellas, News, and the Uses of Casuistry in Early Modern Europe” CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. Raphaëlle Burns teaches and writes about the literatures and…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Professor Andrea Moudarres, UCLA Department of Italian, discusses his recent book, The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic with Professor Gerry Milligan (Director of College Honors Programs, CUNY College of Staten Island). The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic follows the same narrative of internal strife, exploring enmity within the self, the state, and the world through the prism of prominent works of the Italian literary canon: Dante’s Commedia, Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. The…

The Annual Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture This year's speaker is Andrea M. Achi, PhD, Assistant Curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1910, a group of Egyptian farmers claimed they discovered a hoard of Coptic manuscripts in a stone vat outside the village of al-Hamuli of the Fayyum Oasis in Egypt. Sold to J. Pierpont Morgan in 1911, the find amounted to…

The Winter 2021 session of the California Medieval History Seminar will take place online instead of at its usual venue, the Huntington Library. The seminar meets to discuss four pre-distributed research papers  Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. These are the papers…

Watch this event on YouTube Although Columbus discovered the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, the world only became global in the sixteenth century, when the remnants of Magellan’s bedraggled crew straggled back to Spain. Their arrival marked a blue marble moment for early Europeans, as there could no longer be serious doubt about the unity of the globe. For the crew, however, the Europe they found in 1522 differed from the one they departed in 1519. Martin…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Professor Adriana Vazquez, Classics, UCLA “The Influence of Vergil’s Epic Program on Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s Poem Ulisseia ou Lisboa Edificada (1636)” CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. Adriana Vazquez joined the Classics Department at UCLA in 2017. In addition…

Since antiquity, artists have visualized the known world through the female (sometimes male) body. In the age of exploration, America was added to figures of Europe, Asia, and Africa who would come to inhabit the borders of geographical visual imagery. In the abundance of personifications in print, painting, ceramics, tapestry, and sculpture, do portrayals vary between hierarchy and global human dignity? Are we witnessing the emergence of ethnography or of racism? Yet, as this volume shows, depictions of bodies as…

Professor Peter Cowe, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, UCLA “Armenian Integration into Sequential Hemispheric Cultural Norms as Illustrated by the Alexander Romance" CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. S. Peter Cowe is Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies at UCLA and has taught…

Book launch: Domenico Ingenito's "Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry" (Brill, 2020) A conversation with Paul Losensky (Indiana University) and Jane Mikkelson (University of Virginia) Register to attend on Zoom. Sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies. Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry explores the relationship between sexuality, politics, and spirituality in the lyrics of Saʿdi Shirazi (d. 1292 CE), one of the…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Stefanie Matabang, Graduate Student, Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA "Making the Middle Ages Filipino: Colonial Philippines and the Imagined Medieval Period of Empire" CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. Stefanie Matabang received her B.A. at UC Berkeley with a Double…

Session 5 | Bidel in Modern Central Asia, South Asia, Afghanistan, Iran: The Geopolitics of Literary Legacy December 18 RSVP Here (Zoom registration) Bidel’s reception history in modern Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, and South Asia is a fascinating and complex case study in the geopolitics of literary legacy. In Iran, Bidel has been dismissed as an obscure poet whose difficult style relegates him to a peripheral corner of the Persian canon. Bidel’s legacy in South Asia is complicated by the…

Session 4 | Worlds Together Shined: Bidel, Traherne, and Experiments in Comparison A Comparative Project by Jane Mikkelson and Timothy Harrison December 11 RSVP Here (Zoom registration) There are tantalizing similarities between the poetry of Bidel and his contemporaries and early modern English meditative poetry. These literary traditions are not in direct contact with each other, yet they operate in strikingly similar ways (for instance, in their assimilation of scientific ideas and engagement with philosophy and theology). Moreover, these poets are…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Erica Weaver, Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, and co-editor Daniel C. Remein, Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, discuss their book Dating Beowulf: Studies in Intimacy. Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice-versa,…

Session 3 of the multidisciplinary workshop series on Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d. 1720) Friday, November 20, 2020 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (Pacific Time) Register to attend here. This is Session 3 of the multidisciplinary workshop, Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d.1720) organized and led by Prof. Domenico Ingenito (UCLA, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures) and Dr. Jane Mikkelson (University…

Laura Muñoz, PhD Student, UCLA Department of Spanish & Portuguese “Valencia, All a Riot: Lope de Vega’s (Re)Creation of the Valencian Cityscape" CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. LAURA MUÑOZ examines the theatrical production of early modern Valencian playwright Guillén…

The Fall 2020 session of the California Medieval History Seminar will take place online instead of at its usual venue, the Huntington Library. The seminar meets to discuss four pre-distributed research papers  Participants are scholars in the field at various stages of their careers. All attendees at the seminar are expected to read the papers in advance and discuss the research. Speakers and paper topics are announced by e-mail. Click here for additional information about the seminar. The papers under discussion…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Susan Einbinder, Professor of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Connecticut Historians have long noted the literary abundance that characterizes the Great Italian Plague of 1631, but little attention has been paid to the Jewish sources. Yet, Hebrew narrative, poetic, homiletical, and liturgical responses to the worst plague outbreak in northern Italy since the Black Death are revealing and important.  These texts document efforts – administrative, medical, spiritual, practical – to meet the challenge of a pandemic.…

Susanna Elm, Sidney H. Ehrman Professor of European History, UC Berkeley This presentation is part of the CMRS-sponsored Fall 2020 LAMAR Seminar: “The Late Antique World: Transitions and Transformations Between Classical and Medieval” (Classics 250). Invitations to register for the Zoom link will be sent by email.   Image at top: Detail from a late antique mosaic of a man named Fructus being served wine by two of his slaves, Myro and Victor. From Uthina (Oudna) in Tunisia, now in…

Watch this event on YouTube: Introduction, Day 2 Session 1, and Day 2 Session 2. This conference, organized by Geoffrey Symcox (History, UCLA), explores the history and extraordinary art of the Sacri Monti and highlights the contributions of young scholars to this new field of research. G. Symcox “Jerusalem in the Alps: The Sacro Monte of Varallo and the Sanctuaries of North-Western Italy” ISBN: 978-2-503-58057-9 The cluster of pilgrimage centers known as the Sacri Monti, or Holy Mountains, in the western…

Watch this event on YouTube: Introduction, Day 2 Session 1, and Day 2 Session 2. This conference, organized by Geoffrey Symcox (History, UCLA), explores the history and extraordinary art of the Sacri Monti and highlights the contributions of young scholars to this new field of research. G. Symcox "Jerusalem in the Alps: The Sacro Monte of Varallo and the Sanctuaries of North-Western Italy" ISBN: 978-2-503-58057-9 The cluster of pilgrimage centers known as the Sacri Monti, or Holy Mountains, in the western…

Carla Neuss, Graduate Student, Department of Theater, UCLA "South African Medievalism" CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. Carla Neuss is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department at UCLA. She previously earned her B.A. at UC Berkeley in…

C. Michael Chin, Associate Professor of Classics, UC Davis This presentation is part of the CMRS-sponsored Fall 2020 LAMAR Seminar: “The Late Antique World: Transitions and Transformations Between Classical and Medieval” (Classics 250). The session is open to non-enrolled students but it involves a practical element (recreating a late antique pilgrimage) and Professor Chin asks those who attend to not leave before the end of the full session, at least 2-2.5 hours. Invitations to register for the Zoom link will…

We invite you to join CMRS Director Zrinka Stahuljak and the Center’s faculty, students, associates, and staff for the annual Open House celebrating the start of the new academic year. This is the Center’s 58th year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies of the years 600-1600 C.E. Drop in online this year to say hello to old colleagues and introduce yourself to new faculty, new students and those who share your scholarly interests. Find out more about the programs, fellowships,…

CMRS hosts a monthly medieval and Renaissance reading group for graduate students and faculty. CMRS-affiliated graduate students and faculty propose and share an article or a book particularly important for their research, and then participate in an informal discussion about that text. Seeing the diverse topics and methods of our research as one of the central strengths of CMRS, the reading group is focused on providing an intellectually-stimulating but casual space to foster the sorts of conversations that took place…

Kersti Francis, Graduate Student, Department of English, UCLA "Magic and Gender in the Medieval Romances Partenopeu de Blois (Old French) / Partenope of Blois (Middle English)" CMRS is hosting twice-monthly Works-in-Progress Happy Hours to promote intellectual exchange and collegiality while most of us are continuing to work and learn remotely. The Happy Hours are open to UCLA faculty and graduate students and consist of a short informal presentation followed by open discussion. Kersti Francis is a PhD candidate in English…