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William Caxton’s Multilingualism: The Claims of French and Dutch, English and Kentish

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,...

Hydrophilic Archives: Early Handmade Paper in Unstable Environments

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,...

CMRS Research Workshop

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

“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...

In League with Infidels: Sharifs, Persians, Turks and The Renaissance Popes as “Lords and Masters of the World Game”

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

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...

Law and Communal Identity in the Early Medieval Mediterranean

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...

Early History of Africa Symposium: New Narratives for a History of Connections and Brokers

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...

“Let the Whole World Praise the Saint”: Medieval Songs for St. Nicholas

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...

Annual Colloquium in Armenian Studies

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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Winter 2020

Huntington Library, Seaver Classroom 3 1151 Oxford Rd, San Marino, CA

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...

CMRS Research Workshop

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

"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...

Dross? Dunghills? Or Musical Treasures? Rethinking Collectors and Collections of Seventeenth-Century Pop Songs

UCLA Faculty Center 480 Charles E Young Dr East, Los Angeles

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...

42nd Annual UC Celtic Studies Conference

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 – “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” (1499) and the Architecture of Dreams

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

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...

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CANCELED – CMRS Research Workshop

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

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...

POSTPONED – Virtual Classrooms and Mercantile Mischief in Shakespeare’s England

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 – California Medieval History Seminar, Spring 2020

Huntington Library, Seaver Classroom 3 1151 Oxford Rd, San Marino, CA

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 – CMRS Research Workshop

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

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...

POSTPONED – Archive and Theory: The Future of Anglo-American Early Modern Disability Studies

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Annual Open House 2020-21

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Early Christian Storyworlds

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Conference: Varallo and the Sacri Monti of Northwestern Italy, Day 1

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Conference: Varallo and the Sacri Monti of Northwestern Italy, Day 2

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Augustine’s Divjak Letters 10* and 24*: Slavery, Captivity, Status and Original Sin

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Writing Plague: Jewish Sources on the Great Italian Plague (1631)

Zoom Meeting Online

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 Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Fall 2020

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Co-Sponsored Workshop | Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d. 1720)

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

New Book Salon

Zoom Meeting Online

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 Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Co-Sponsored Workshop | Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d. 1720)

Zoom Meeting Online

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,...

CMRS Co-Sponsored Workshop | Steadfast Imagining: Lyric Meditation, Islamic Philosophy, and Comparative Religion in the Works of Bidel of Delhi (d. 1720)

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Co-sponsored Event | Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

“Bodies and Maps” — A New Book

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

1521: Making the World While Breaking the World

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Winter 2021

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

Professor Stella Nair, Art History, UCLA “The Gendered Landscapes of Inca Architecture” 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...

A Library of Memories: Textual Preservation at the Monastery of St. Michael in Egypt

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

“The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic” – New Book Salon

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

CMRS Reading Group for Graduate Students and Faculty

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Works-in-Progress Happy Hour

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Spatial Grammars: The Union of Art and Writing in the Painted Books of Aztec Mexico

Location to be announced please check back.

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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Spring 2021

Location to be announced please check back.

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...

Law and Disorder: Fools, Outlaws, and Justice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – Day 1

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Law and Disorder: Fools, Outlaws, and Justice in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – Day 2

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Dancing Odissi and the Question of the ‘Medieval’ in Indian Performance History

Zoom Meeting Online

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....

Symposium in Homage to Michel Jeanneret (1940-2019)

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Slavery’s Archive in the Premodern World

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Signs of Sex: Comparative Semiotics of Virginity in the Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian Worlds

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Beholding Beauty: Sa’di of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

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....

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

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....

Virtual Classrooms and Mercantile Mischief in Shakespeare’s England

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...

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Fall 2021

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Chosŏn Korea and the Imperial Tradition in East Asia, 1392-1592

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Petrarch’s African canzoniere: Lyric Anthropology and the Question of Race

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Afterlives: Dante in Dialogue with East Asian Buddhism | Day 1

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Afterlives: Dante in Dialogue with East Asian Buddhism | Day 2

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

RESCHEDULED From Romance to Romance: Translating Medieval and Early Modern Romance Vernacular Texts (13th-18th c.) – Day 1

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

RESCHEDULED go to new page https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/from-romance-to-romance-1/  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...

MEMSA Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

RESCHEDULED From Romance to Romance: Translating Medieval and Early Modern Romance Vernacular Texts (13th-18th c.) – Day 2

Royce Hall Room 306 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

RESCHEDULED go to new page https://cmrs.ucla.edu/event/from-romance-to-romance-1/  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...

New Book Salon: Carla Pestana’s “The World of Plymouth Plantation”

Author Carla Gardina Pestana (History, UCLA) joins Alex Mazzaferro (English, UCLA) in discussion about her new book, The World of Plymouth Plantation. Register to attend online. The English settlement at Plymouth has usually been seen in isolation. Indeed, the colonists gain our admiration in part because we envision them arriving on a desolate, frozen shore,...

Reading Against Distraction in Early Medieval England

Junior Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop This session with Assistant Professor Erica Weaver (English) explores intersections of attention, obedience, and performance in 10th- and 11th-c. Benedictine monasticism as she examines these issues in her book Reading Against Distraction in Early Medieval England. Reviewers are Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia) and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (UC Berkeley). These...

Ancient and Modern Categories: How Historians Formulate Race

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

The reading group kicks-off the quarter discussing the introduction from Cord Whitaker's Black Metaphors, titled "Moving Backward: Blackness in Modernity, Early Modernity, and the Middle Ages". The text is here. Please read the meeting ground rules prior to attendance. Register for the meeting here. Open to UCLA Faculty and Graduate Students. Questions? Contact memsa.ucla@gmail.com. Future meetings will...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? Cultural Heritage between Anthropology and Epistemology

Zoom Meeting Online

The speaker is Etienne Anheim (EHESS-CRH). The title of his talk is "Where Does Nature End and Culture Begin? Cultural Heritage between Anthropology and Epistemology." The heritage movement that affects contemporary society has continued to expand, but the notion of heritage has also diversified. One of its main divisions has been based on the opposition...

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

The reading to be discussed is "Creating Chichimec-Uanacaze Ethnic Identity," Chapter 4 from Angélica Jimena Afanador-Pujol's The Relación de Michoacán: (1539-1541) and the Politics of Representation in Colonial Mexico. The Introduction to the book is also included as optional reading, which may be very helpful in providing a context for the Relación. You can find...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

As Inconvenient and Offensive as Abundance

Zoom Meeting Online

Adam Talib ( School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University) discusses "As Inconvenient and Offensive as Abundance." Literary studies developed in European modernity in conditions of cultural scarcity and narrowness, though it has often laid claims to universality and universal applicability, especially as it rose to epistemic hegemony in its colonial and global phases. The...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Copying and Reading Sacred Scriptures: Qurʾan and Torah in Comparative Perspective

Zoom Meeting Online

This talk by Professor Daniella Talmon-Heller (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) will highlight commonalities and differences between Jewish and Muslim thinking about the aural, graphic, and material forms of the Torah and Qurʾan. Jews and Muslims have both been preoccupied with transcribing and reading the authentic text as accurately as possible while securing its sanctity....

A Woman’s Pleasure: Philosophy and Sexuality in the Poetry of Sulpicia

Zoom Meeting Online

A lecture by Erin McKenna Hanses (Penn State University), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). In his diatribe against love in De Rerum Natura Book 4, Lucretius includes an idea found rarely in male-authored Roman poetry: the Epicurean asserts...

California Medieval History Seminar, Winter 2022

Zoom Meeting Online

The Winter 2022 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...

MEMSA Race Reading Group

Zoom Meeting Online

For the final winter quarter meeting of the MEMSA premodern race reading group, discussion centers on Sylvia Wynter's "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation-- An Argument." UCLA graduate students and faculty from all departments and all participatory levels are welcome to join the discussion, whether you want to contribute...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Green Like a Woman: Gender Expression and Erotic Manners

Zoom Meeting Online

A lecture by Tommaso Gazzarri (Union College), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). Professor Gazzarri's research explores the ancient association of the color galbinus with the figure of the cinaedus (Martial 3.82.5; Juvenal 2.97)....

New Book Salon: Zrinka Stahuljak’s “Les Fixeurs au Moyen âge – Histoire et littérature connectées”

Zoom Meeting Online

A book panel on "Invisible Persons, Invisible Texts: Translation and Translators in Medieval and Modern Afghanistan and the West" with Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA), Jawanshir Rasikh (Independent Scholar), and Arezou Azad (Oxford). Discussant: Domenico Ingenito (UCLA). Register to attend on Zoom. 9:30 am - 11 am Pacific Time Organized by the UCLA Program on Central Asia....

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

A Two-Way Road: Comparative Anthropology of Eros and Sensuality in Latin Elegy and the Greek Novel

Zoom Meeting Online

A lecture by Romain Brethes (Sciences Politiques, Paris), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). One of the emerging questions facing scholars of the Greek novel, and imperial Greek literature more generally, is the...

RESCHEDULED The Future of Medieval France

RESCHEDULED FOR FEBRUARY 2023 An international conference on the past, present, and future of medieval studies in Europe. Organized by Associate Professor Meredith Cohen (Department of Art History, UCLA) and Professor Zrinka Stahuljak (CMRS Director, Department of Comparative Literature, and European Languages & Transcultural Studies, UCLA). Schedule and location to be announced.

Unreadable Exemplars: Veiled Women and Exotic Others in 16th-Century Books

Royce 236 10745 Dickson Plaza, Los Angeles

The UCLA Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies presents the 2021-2022 Charles Speroni Endowed Chair Lecture by Professor Susan Gaylard. Early sixteenth-century developments in printing brought forth a profusion of illustrated history books. Many of these histories included a high proportion of women’s images and biographies. Yet by the 1560s, images of women had...

From Medieval Afghanistan, “The Most Beautiful of Stories”: Jami’s Yūsuf-u Zulaykhā, a Persian reading group and workshop series

Zoom Meeting Online

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...

Why (and How) Should a Platonist Laugh at Eros? Humor and Love in the “Symposium”

Zoom Meeting Online

A lecture by Pierre Destrée (Université de Louvain), part of the Winter 2022 CMRS-CEGS Research Seminar, Classics 250, “Eros. Amor. The Erotic Cultures of the Early Global World” taught by Professor Giulia Sissa (Political Science and Classics). In all societies and cultures, the erotic experience is complex. It is shaped by norms, habits, emotions and manners...