CMRS Conference Narratives of metamorphosis, from human into other living and mineral forms, have long provided an important tool for thinking through the complexities of our relationship with the world around us. From Ovid to David Cronenberg, thinkers and artists have used the trope of physical transformation to figure the ways in which human and...

A Book Discussion with Lamia Balafrej (UCLA), Margaret S. Graves (Indiana University), Domenico Ingenito (UCLA), and Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University) Margaret Graves (Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Indiana University), Domenico Ingenito (Assistant Professor of Classical Persian, UCLA), and Kishwar Rizvi (Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture, Yale University) will discuss The Making of the...

A  conference presented by the UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies,  UCLA Cardiac Arrhythmia Center – David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, UCLA  ArtSci Center, and Caltech. This conference was proposed and brought to fruition primarily through the inspiration and efforts of Francis Wells. Organized by: Francis Wells (Cardiac Surgeon, Royal Papworth Hospital and...

“Franks that are Acclimatized are Better: Anecdotal History and Everyday Life in Usāma ibn Munqidh’s Kitab al I‘tibar” Gina Lorenz (Graduate Student, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA) In his Kitab al I‘tibar, the warrior, gentleman, and poet Usāma ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) describes Franks as beasts, devils, and friends. He tells tales of epic battles and...

The Fall 2019 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library 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...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Jay Reed (Professor, Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University) considers John Clapham's Latin poem Narcissus (published in London in 1591) which heavily embroiders Ovid's ancient version of the myth with such later European traditions as the allegory of love and the Virgin Queen. This poem of the English Renaissance, as a...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Jay Reed (Classics and Comparative Literature, Brown University) The Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega’s three surviving Latin odes (from around 1532-36) have begun to be studied for the way they—like his much larger Spanish output—juxtapose and intertwine imperial and erotic themes. In both bodies of work there emerges...

CMRS Pop-Up Faculty-Graduate Student Workshop This workshop understands the term “passage” in two ways: first, as the physical passage or journey that serves, as much as the shore, to define Mediterranean spaces and, second, as the specific literary passage that grounds our thinking about “the Mediterranean” as theoretical, or even disciplinary, space. We hope this...

“Jesuit Pulpits with Wood Sculptures of Africa, America, Asia, and Europe Personifications” Maryanne Horowitz (Professor, History, Occidental College; CMRS Associate) Each CMRS Research Workshop is based on a pre-circulated research paper that the presenter—who may be a CMRS faculty member, associate, affiliate, or graduate student—wishes to discuss with colleagues. All attendees must read the paper...

CMRS Italian Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture This lecture by Professor Massimo Riva (Italian, Brown University) presents a pilot project of the Brown University Digital Publications Initiative, supported by the Mellon Foundation: a digital monograph focused on Italy as an imagined country, and illustrious or forgotten figures from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Italian art, history and...

This talk will be based on Professor Calderwood's current book project, which examines representations of al-Andalus (medieval Muslim Iberia) in contemporary literature, film, television, music, and tourism. Eric Calderwood is an Associate Professor in the Program in Comparative and World Literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and...

Sponsored by the Center for Near Eastern Studies and co-sponsored by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. (Please note the time change, now starting at 5:00 pm, not 6:00.) The Ornament of the World tells a story from the past that’s especially timely today: the story of a remarkable time in history when Muslims, Christians...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture This lecture by Professor Ad Putter (Professor of Medieval English and Director, Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies, University of Bristol) explores the multilingualism of England in the fifteenth century by examining the life and works of the first English printer, William Caxton. In standard histories of the English language,...

Richard & Mary Rouse Annual History of the Book Lecture Joshua Calhoun (Associate Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison) Paper loves water, but the hydrophilic property of paper is both a feature and a bug: it cannot be created without water, and it can be easily destroyed by water. This talk explores the revolutionary,...

“The Hypocrisy of Signs: Hermeneutics of Action and Belief in the Aftermath of the Sephardic Diaspora (Italy and Catholic Europe, XVI-XVII centuries)” David Sebastiani (PhD Candidate, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy) Each CMRS Research Workshop is based on a pre-circulated research paper that the presenter—who may be a CMRS faculty member, associate, affiliate, or graduate...

CMRS Pop-Up Workshop Celine Dauverd (Associate Professor, History, University of Colorado Boulder) The Fall of Constantinople shook the western world. But it also forced the head of the Christian world to reinvent itself. Countless Muslim raids over the Italian peninsula coupled with the need to preserve Rome as a sovereign city-state compelled the papacy to...

CMRS Conference Organized by Jessica Goldberg (History, UCLA) and Luke Yarbrough (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA). Preliminary drafts of petition to the Fatimid caliph al-Mustanṣir (11th c. CE). Cambridge University Library, T-S Ar. 30.278, recto. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. This conference investigates how law shaped the boundaries...

This symposium presents an opportunity to think about different methodologies and different ways of writing history when faced with the challenge of sources. Can we still use the traditional narrative within a connected history of brokers, frontiers, and cultural transfers, or should we be thinking about different ways of telling history, developing, for instance, network...

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Mary Channen Caldwell (Assistant Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania). St. Nicholas was unquestionably one of the most popular and accessible saints in medieval Europe, serving as patron saint to everyone from sailors and unmarried women, to clerics, children, and repentant thieves. Due to his role as “everyman’s saint,” Nicholas...

Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies University of California, Los Angeles Royce Hall 314 February 7, 2020 9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast 10:00 – 10:10 Opening Remarks Anatolii Tokmantcev (Director of the 2020 Graduate Student Colloquium in Armenian Studies Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) Dr. S. Peter Cowe (Narekatsi Professor of Armenian Studies, Near Eastern Languages...

The Winter 2020 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library 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...

"Michael Servetus, his clashes with deans Tagault and Lax, and their serious consequences: his anonymous works from 1538 ahead, and his exile from Spain in 1527" Miguel Gonzalez Ancin (Independent Scholar) This paper examines the medical, grammatical, biblical and poetical works by Michael Servetus - studied by servetian González Echeverría- which were printed anonymously in...

Annual William & Lois Matthews Samuel Pepys Lecture Angela McShane (Head of Research, Wellcome Collection; Associate Fellow, History, University of Warwick) Pop-music collections are remarkable things: expressing individual taste and evidencing engagement with the products of the music industry, they become nostalgic compilations almost from the first moment of their construction. Judging how far an...

Sponsored by the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Celtic Colloquium, the Department of English, Dean David Schaberg and the Humanities Division, the Program in Indo-European Studies, and the Campus Programs Committee of the Program Activities Board. THURSDAY, MARCH 5 | UCLA ROYCE 314 2:00 Welcoming Remarks SESSION I - Chair: Joseph Nagy...

CANCELED - Demetra Vogiatzaki, History of Architecture, Harvard University 2020 UCLA Ahmanson Research Fellow This presentation investigates the continuum of dreams and architecture staged in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a 1499 publication that exerted significant influence in art and architecture for more than two centuries. Published by the press of Aldo Manuzio, the bizarre narrative of Hypnerotomachia...

CANCELED - “Gender, Architecture and Erasure in the Fifteenth-Century Andes” Stella Nair (Professor, Art History, UCLA) Women played critical roles throughout Andean History. Yet gender biases set forth in the Iberian colonization of the Andes and continued by scholars have silenced and effectively erased women’s roles in designing, constructing, and giving meaning to the Inca...

TO BE RESCHEDULED - Annual Armand Hammer Art History Lecture 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...

TO BE RESCHEDULED FALL 2020 - CMRS Conference 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. The cluster of pilgrimage centers known as the Sacri Monti, or Holy Mountains, in the western...

TO BE RESCHEDULED FALL 2020 - CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor 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...

CANCELED - The Spring 2020 session of the California Medieval History Seminar meets at the Huntington Library 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...

CANCELED - "Haptic Phenomenologies: Bloody Fists and Feeling Fingers in The Secret History of the Mongols" Misho Ishikawa (Graduate Student, English, UCLA) This paper looks at Ming-era (ca. 1400) translations of The Secret History of the Mongols. The focus of the workshop is on how these texts attune to hands and fingers as the dominant metaphor...

TO BE RESCHEDULED SPRING 2021 - CMRS Symposium The word “fool” is itself a performer, a loaded term prone to an explosion of meaning even when handled with care. Even before the Middle Ages, this figure of ambiguity—called variously jongleur, jester, madman, storyteller--was both castigated as vulgar and heralded as purveyor of literary art, derided...

A conference sponsored by UCLA Center for 17th-and-18th Century Studies. Organized by Helen Deutsch (UCLA), Jason Farr (Marquette University), Paul Kelleher (Emory University), and Jared Richman (Colorado College). Co-sponsored by UCLA’s Dean of Humanities, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Undergraduate Education Initiatives-Disability Studies, Department of English, Department of History, and Joyce Appleby Chair of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...