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CMRS Open House

You are invited to join CMRS Director Zrinka Stahuljak and the Center’s staff for the annual Open House celebrating the start of the new academic year. This is the Center’s 57th year of promoting interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies related to the years 600-1600 C.E. Please visit with and meet professors, students, colleagues, and friends who...

Metamorphosis and the Environmental Imagination from Ovid to Shakespeare

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...

Authorship in Persian Painting

10383 Bunche Hall

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...

Leonardo da Vinci, Inventing the Future: Flight, Automata, Art, Anatomy, Biomorphism

UCLA California NanoSystems Institute Conference Room 570 Westwood Plaza, Building 114, Los Angeles, CA

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...

CMRS Research Workshop

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

“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...

California Medieval History Seminar, Fall 2019

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

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...

Clapham’s “Narcissus” (1591) and the Isle of the Virgin Queen

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

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...

Love and Empire in Garcilaso de la Vega’s Latin Odes

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...

Mediterranean Passages

French Seminar Room. Royce 236 Los Angeles, CA

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...

CMRS Research Workshop

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

“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...

The World in A Box: For a (Curious) History of Virtual Reality

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...

Shakespeare Among the Boars: Translating Desire in Renaissance Literature

CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture Professor Ivan Lupić (English, Stanford University). “Had I been toothed like him ,” says Venus in Shakespeare’s 1593 narrative poem, “with kissing him I should have killed him first.” We learn from the rest of the poem that Adonis has been transformed into a flower and that Venus has gone...

The Future of al-Andalus

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

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...

“Ornament of the World” Film Screening

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Medieval Texts Reading Group Fall 2024 Meeting

Kaplan 193 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA

The UCLA Medieval Texts Reading Group welcomes undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, and faculty interested in medieval literature. On the third Friday of each term, we get together to discuss a text in English translation from across the Global Middle Ages, to think about what it tells us about its cultural and literary context. Each discussion will be...