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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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....
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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 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)....
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....
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 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 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.
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...
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 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...
Alexander Beecroft, (Jessie Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of Foreign Languages, University of South Carolina) presents a talk titled “Contactless Comparison.” It’s easy to compare things that are produced near each other, by people who are able to influence each other. Traditionally, comparative literature has therefore compared literatures in close contact with each other: at first...
This conference (online and onsite) brings together scholars to consider different manuscript communities in Europe, their textual and iconographic traditions, and more globally, an exploration of communities that produced “families” of Hebrew manuscripts and enabled transmissions across languages and societies. Motivation to organize this conference stems from The J. Paul Getty Museum’s recent acquisition of...
The sensory turn in many areas of the humanities has failed to make a significant impression on Islamic and Middle East Studies, and on the study of Islamic history in particular. In the last couple of years, however, there has been a rise in interest in historical manifestations of the Muslim sensorium. This is demonstrated...
A lecture by Professor Anthony Grafton (Princeton University). Ecclesiastical history began in the 1550s, when the Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus organized a collaborative century-by-century history of Christianity. This confessional project never reached completion, and its thick volumes met with severe criticism from co-religionists as well as Catholics. Nonetheless, it provided a new model for the...
Dominic Brookshaw (Oxford University) "Zulaykha’s Redemption: From Lustful Villain to Female Icon" The guile associated with Zulaykha in the Qur’an is largely absent from her depiction in the ghazals of fourteenth-century Iran. The negativity surrounding Zulaykha’s expression (or manifestation) of female sexuality dims in the Persian ghazal where we witness the character’s salvific rehabilitation. On...
The Annual Richard & Mary Rouse History of the Book Lecture In the late third and fourth centuries, a number of men and women from Egypt, Palestine, and Syria chose to make a daring break with society, renouncing their familial claims and wealth so that they could lead a life of perfection in the desert....
Leili Anvar (Sorbonne, Paris) "From the Desert of Arabia to the Gardens of Herat: Wanderings of Majnûn, the Poet-Lover" In this presentation, we will follow Majnûn in his journeys from the Arabic poems to the great Persian masnavis (composed by Nezâmi, Amir Khosrow Dehlavi and Jâmi). We shall see how -with the development of sufism and...
Prashant Keshavmurthy (McGill University) "Reading Niẓāmi Ganjavī’s Leylī u Majnūn as a Novel" Neither the Byzantines nor the Persians had any generic name for the Greek and Persian novels that were composed in the 12th century. Beholden to older (Attic Greek and Abbasid Arabic) models, the taxonomies of literary forms in both geographically adjacent literary cultures lagged...
A lecture by Professor Paulin Ismard (History, Université Aix-Marseille). Organized by the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory and co-sponsored by CMRS-CEGS. About the Lecture: Professor Ismard will question the benefit that specialists of Greco-Roman slavery can gain from dialogue with the historians of slavery from other periods. Considering the question of the relationship between...
Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to come across best in black-and-white. The recent release of a stunning new version of this blood-soaked tragedy, directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, has spurred renewed interest in the play and its history in film. Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa's 1957 Japanese reworking of Macbeth (also...
The caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd (d. 193/809) allegedly led the ḥajj nine times over the course of his twenty-three-year reign, in 188/804 he was also the last ʿAbbāsid caliph to lead the pilgrimage rites. The pilgrimage served as a means of legitimation as well as a place of succession and nomination, with Hārūn and his wife Zubayda...
Justine Landau (Sorbonne) "An Epic Tribute to the Lyric Poem" Poetry does things with words. In the premodern world, this fact is perhaps nowhere acknowledged more unanimously than in the Persianate sources. Chief among the arts of language, lyric poetry is associated with “licit magic,” after the Arabic saying, since its mastery is said to...
The Spring 2022 session of the California Medieval History Seminar will take place at its original 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...
Julia Rubanovich (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents an online lecture titled "The Tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā through the Eyes of a Jewish Poet". This talk will examine a string of episodes from the tale of Yūsuf and Zulaykhā embedded into the “Book of Genesis” (Bereshit-nāma), a biblical poem composed by the fourteenth-century Judeo-Persian poet...
