CILAVS: The destruction of images in the medieval and early modern world: Jews, Muslims, Protestants and Catholics in Iberia 20 November 2020 6pm

CILAVS warmly invites you to the seminar:
The destruction of images in the medieval and early modern world: Jews, Muslims, Protestants and Catholics in Iberia
Professor Borja Franco
 
Friday, 20 November 2020 from 6 to 7.30pm Live Online 
 
In this paper, Prof Borja Franco presents the main written and visual sources that captured trials for iconoclastic behaviour in medieval and early modern Iberia. He shall explore the reasons for these actions and their political and religious repercussions. A comparative study of the various socio-religious groups reveals that the theological discourse behind each iconoclastic action varied with each case study. Furthermore, it will be shown that iconoclastic attitudes were not the exclusive territory of ‘heretics’ or ‘infidels’ and that even Catholics were persecuted for their hostile attitudes to images.
 
Borja Franco Llopis is a Professor at the Department of Art History in the UNED (Spain). His research is devoted to the visual and literary representation of the otherness in Southern Europe. He has been a visiting scholar in several prestigious institutions such as the School of History and Archaeology in Rome, the Instituto Storico per el Medievo (Rome), the Warburg Institute (London), Johns Hopkins University, University of California (Berkeley), Harvard University, Columbia University, Universidade Nova of Lisbon and NYU; and Visiting Professor at the University of Genoa. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Art History in the UNED (Spain), the PI of the research group “Before Orientalism. Images of the Muslim Other in Iberia (15-17th Centuries) and their Mediterranean connections” and working Group Leader of the Cost Action 18129: Islamic Legacy: Narratives East, West, South, North of the Mediterranean. He has recently published the monographs titled: Pintando al converso: la imagen del morisco en la peninsula ibérica (1492-1614) (Cátedra, 2019), and Etnicità e conversione. Immagini di moriscos nella cultural visuale dell’età moderna (Affinità Elettive, 2020). He has also co-edited the book: Muslim and Jews made Visible in Christian Iberia and beyond (14-18th centuries) (Brill 2019).
The event is free, although you will need to book.
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Murray Seminar: Power – Friendship – Faith. Christoph Brachmann, 4 November 2020 – 5pm

Click here to register for the Murray Seminar, 4 November 2020

Nowadays located in the backwaters of Eastern France, the monumental Sépulcre in Saint-Mihiel is certainly one of the most remarkable works of sixteenth-century sculpture. Crafted in ca. 1560 by the Lorraine artist Ligier Richier it is among the few artifacts of the region that have attracted art historical interest at all. Mostly scholars interpreted it as a fragment of a much bigger project that included not only an entombment but also a crucifixion and a lamentation. It was assumed that these scenes have remained unfinished because the sculptor—interestingly a Calvinist—had to flee the country for religious reasons in 1564.

In contrast, this talk will reveal that the idiosyncrasies of the indeed highly unusual program have very different reasons. With a surprisingly prominent background, it can be regarded as one of the most sophisticated of the time that contains much more than just a religious message in the context of rising conflicts between Catholics and Protestants. Combining influences of a multitude of prominent artifacts of the period the Sépulcre also becomes almost a key work for the understanding of some important political aspects of sixteenth-century France.

We hope that you can join us.

The History of Art Department,

Birkbeck, University of London

If you would like to subscribe from this Mailing List, please contact l.jacobus@bbk.ac.uk with the subject-line ‘SUBSCRIBE MURRAY’. Alternatively, if you know of anyone who might find these research seminars interesting, ask them to write with ‘SUBSCRIBE MURRAY’ in the subject line.

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Covid-19 in Historical Perspective: an ‘in conversation’ series – The Raphael Samuel History Centre

Covid-19 in Historical Perspective: an ‘in conversation’ series

The Raphael Samuel History Centre, in partnership with Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage at Manchester Metropolitan University, invite you to an ‘in conversation’ series on Covid-19 in Historical Perspective.  Building on our first workshop (Doing Public History in Lockdown and Beyond) and bringing together historical experts on health, disease, policy, and more, this series or workshops will explore the many historical perspectives through which we can view, and better understand, the current coronavirus pandemic and the political and cultural responses to it.   In each session, a panel of historians will discuss and reflect upon key questions, comparisons, contrasts, and ‘lessons’ that we might draw upon to help us make sense of the present through an examination of the past.

These virtual events are free and open to all, but registration is essential. Please specify which event(s) you’d like to join. Contact the RSHC administrator Katy Pettit to register: K.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

Please note that all events will be recorded and by joining the event you give your permission to be recorded.

Thursday 12th November, 4.00pm – 5.30pm GMT

The History of Pandemic Responses

What have pandemic responses looked like, and what public health and political tensions have there been, in different times and place?

Discussants:

Matthew McCormack (University of Northampton):  The Pandemic Response in the context of British political history

Matt Vester (West Virginia University):  Pandemic politics during the renaissance

Rosa Salzberg (University of Warwick): Lockdown and early modern Venice

Henry Irving (Leeds Beckett University):  Keep Calm and Carry On: Comms in the Crisis

 

***

Thursday 26th November, 5.00 – 6.30pm 

Can we learn any lessons from history?

Can history tell us anything about how to better manage our current crisis?

Discussants:

Virginia Berridge (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine): Swine flu, HIV/AIDS, and public health in local government

Alex Mold (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine): Behaviour, change, and histories of public health

David Arnold (University of Warwick): The Pandemic in India: Influenza and Covid-19 compared

Guillaume Lachenal and Gaëtan Thomas (Sciences Po, Paris): When history has no lessons

 

***

 

Wednesday 2nd December, 4:00 – 5.30pm

Change and Continuity

How is this pandemic, and our political, social and cultural responses to it, similar from or different to past moments of intense crisis and change?  Can we use history to imagine what life after coronavirus might look like?

Discussants:

Frank Trentmann (Birkbeck, University of London): Consuming at a Distance

Kat Hill (Birkbeck, University of London): Awaiting Apocalypse in historical perspective

Andrew Jackson (Bishop Grosseteste University): The legacies of 1919 and 2020 in the community

Agnes Arnold-Forster (University of Bristol): The long history of health inequalities

These virtual events are free and open to all, but registration is essential. Please specify which event(s) you’d like to join. Contact the RSHC administrator Katy Pettit to register: K.pettit@bbk.ac.uk

 

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Coming Soon to the Peltz Gallery: Replaced Lives 8 January – 16 February 2018

Replaced Lives will come to Peltz Gallery at the beginning of 2018. Commissioned by Birkbeck Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (BRAKC), four artist printmakers sharing the same studio created works in the exhibition as a unique visual response to the ‘Replacement’ conference held at Birkbeck in December 2016. All four artists explored one aspect in the drama of replacement—that of replaced lives.

The launch reception of the exhibition will take place on 11th January 2018, 6:00-8:00pm. Please reserve your free place here.

If you would like to know more about the creative process behind the exhibition, come and join us in the Gallery in the Artists Q&A session on 23rd January 2018, 6:30-8:30pm. Find out more and reserve your free place here.

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Murray Seminar: Mary Magdalene in Byzantium – 6 December 2018 5pm

A reminder that Cecily Hennessy will be speaking on Wednesday 6th December at the Murray Seminar at Birkbeck (43, Gordon Sq., London WC1H 0PD) at 5pm.  As ever, the talk will finish by 5.50pm (allowing those with other commitments to leave) and is then followed by discussion and refreshments.  Details of her talk  are below, and we hope to see you there.

Mary Magdalene in Byzantium

While Mary Magdalene’s relics were housed from about 900 in a most splendid church built by Leo VI in Constantinople, she is often thought to be an insignificant saint in the east, although several indications suggest a more complex situation. This paper examines the Early Christian and Byzantine imagery of Mary, explores some eastern texts that contributed to forming her identity and endeavours to understand why the two traditions, east and west, are so distinct. 

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Call for Applications to the Locarno Documentary Summer School (7-11 AUGUST)

Submissions are open until Friday 23 June (CET) to the 18th Documentary Summer School (7-11 August 2017 in Locarno, Switzerland), a residential educational program, jointly organized by the Institute of Media and Journalism of the Università della Svizzera italiana ( www.imeg.com.usi.ch/en/index.htm ) with the Locarno International Film Festival. This year’s theme is “To show or not to show. The possibilities and limits of shocking images in documentary filmmaking”. Guest lecturer Prof. Brian Winston (University of Lincoln) will join a faculty of international academics and practitioners, including award-winning filmmaker Andrea Segre (Shun Li and the Poet).

Participation is open to 25 graduate students in the fields of film, media and communications studies. Early doctoral students and emerging filmmakers are also welcome to apply. The official language of the Documentary Summer School is English.

Full program, costs, conditions of participation and guidelines for submission can be found here < www.pardolive.ch/pardo/professionals/summer-academy/documentary-summer-school.html >

 

Please send information enquiries and applications to:

Gloria Dagnino, PhD – gloria.dagnino@usi.ch

Università della Svizzera italiana

via Buffi 13, 6900 Lugano

Tel. +41 (0)58 666 4814

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Marina Warner Workshops: Arabic Poetry and Stories Translation Workshops – May-June 2017

Arabic Poetry and Stories Translation Workshops

‘It was and it was not…’: Translation in Action

(from Arabic into English)

May 11, May 25, June 6, June 27** 2017

**Please note the workshop on the 27th June will now take place in 

Room S118 , Paul Webley Wing (Senate House North Block) SOAS.

Professor Marina Warner (Birkbeck)

Professor Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS)

In conjunction with the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbeck. Directed by Steve Willey.

Booking: http://www.chase.ac.uk/arabic-poetry-translation

chase

Workshop Topics and Dates

Workshop 1: May 11 The writer Hanan al- Shaykh will discuss her work with translator Catherine Cobham.

Topic: The Wiles of Women. Poetry and Stories from The 1001 Nights (2:30 to 5:30 pm, SOAS, B104)

Public reading. 6.30-8.00 pm (SOAS B104)

Workshop 2: May 25 The writer Hoda Barakat will discuss her work; with translator Marilyn Booth, Khalid bin Abdullah Al Saud Professor in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World, Oxford.

Topic: Mad Love. Nizami, The Seven Pavilions: The Tale of Leila and Majnun.   (2:30 to 5:30 pm, SOAS, SWLT)

Public reading, 6.30-8.00pm (SOAS SWLT)

Workshop 3: June 6 Writers tbc,  with Julia Bray, Laudian Professor, Oxford, and editor of Ibn Sai, The Consorts of the Caliphs.

Topic: Singing Girls. Poetry, stories, satire and elegy in the songs of the Abbasid qiyan (Birkbeck , Room 102, 30 Russell Square)

Workshop 4: June 27  The poets Tamim al=Barghouti and Yousif al-Qasmiyeh will read their work and discuss it.

Topic: Islamic Sicily or Siculo-Arab Literature: poems of Ibn Hamdis and others, and fables from Ibn Zafer, Solwan or the Waters of Comfort (Birkbeck, Room 102, 30 Russell Square)

**Please note the workshop on the 27th June will now take place in 

Room S118 , Paul Webley Wing (Senate House North Block) SOAS.

Final workshop in September/October will showcase the work completed over the summer.

Participants

16 places for CHASE PhD students; 10 places reserved for independent translators and scholars, for a total of 20 for each workshop.

Objectives

A: The workshops proposed will adapt methods used for bringing Greek tragedy to an Anglophone reader and apply them to Arabic literature.

With the help of scholars of Arabic literature, who are interested in the wider transmission and enjoyment of their subject, students will work alongside poets, dramatists, translation theorists, and writers of fiction, in order to revision (‘awaken’) Arabic literary texts for contemporary readers/audiences.

It has become customary, for example, for a poet with no Greek or Anglo-Saxon to re-inhabit a myth or a legend and bring it to vigorous new life– famous examples include Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Simon Armitage’s King Arthur, and the inspired contemporary revoicings of Ovid by Timberlake Wertenbaker and Kate Tempest. By contrast, the riches of classical and traditional literature in Arabic have in some sense been kept from those who cannot read or understand the language. The complexities of Arabic prosody and the vast range of genres and expressions of the Arabic and Persian narrative and poetic corpus seem to preclude access to all but scholars. Workshop participants will explore means and ways to make this literature accessible beyond the specialist circle.

The joint workshops themselves will examine how stories, motifs, characters, images travel across borders and migrate into new host cultures, moving into different languages, different genres, and on to different registers.

B: The workshops also set out to investigate collaborative exploration and discussion for translation/literary recreation in itself. Can the workshop model be a stimulus to the making of fresh, vigorous reawakened material from unfamiliar contexts and languages the writer-translator does not always know? The group sessions will provide the scope to be innovative about participation and collaboration for literary creativity.

Translators of the writers taking part will be present to discuss their task. However the project differs from strict translation, as applies to the work of contemporary Arabic novelists. The workshops are focusing on canonical/ancient/medieval/traditional material and its varying expressions because in this era of hostility to cultures associated with Islam, it is more important than ever to explore the riches of their vast literature and to understand the mutual entanglement of literary traditions.

These workshops will continue the project Stories in Transit, which undertakes nourishing storytelling and creativity in refugee communities. The project began in Oxford in May 2016 and Palermo in September 2016 and May 2017, and is a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Palermo, and the NGO Bibliothèques sans Frontières.

The material will include songs and squibs by medieval women poets, romances from Persia, the lyric poetry in Tales of the 1001 Nights, animal and other fables from Solwan, or The Waters of Comfort by Ibn Zafer from Sicily, written in the l2th century, or materials participants themselves propose.

Participants will attend all four workshops at which the visiting speaker and translator will address a text or group of texts; a general discussion about them will follow, leading to a choice of subject to develop work on over the summer and a reunion in the autumn to review the fruits of the workshop.  These will not aim to give faithful versions of the originals, but transpose them, sometimes even into a different form – eg poem to drama, story to song – the reawaken them and communicate them to readers and audiences today.

Booking: http://www.chase.ac.uk/arabic-poetry-translation

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CFP: Waste: A Symposium 21 September 17 (cfp deadline 1 May 2017)

Waste: A Symposium

Papers on Disposability, Decay, and Depletion    

A one-day event to be held at Birkbeck College, University of London, on 21 September 2017.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

  • Professor Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London)
  • Dr Leo Mellor (University of Cambridge)
  • Dr Rachele Dini (UCL / University of Cambridge)

Conference overview:

This one-day interdisciplinary event will make visible the untold story of waste by exploring its representations, both material and metaphorical, within contemporary culture. Through an investigation of waste’s presence (or lack thereof) within modern life, this conference will disrupt the entrenched value judgements surrounding objects, places and people otherwise deemed redundant. By exploring how we create, classify and treat waste material this discussion will simultaneously review and challenge the ethics of human waste(-ing); the marginalisation of populations rendered disposable within a globalised socio-economic framework. Calling on related discourses from the arts, social sciences, medical humanities and beyond, this symposium will bring together a diverse mix of academics, artists and industry experts to share insights on a (waste) matter that impacts and implicates us all.

The event will be free to attend, with lunch and refreshments provided on the day and a drinks reception for attendees and speakers in the evening.

Call for papers:

Proposals are invited for twenty minute papers which will be presented in panels of three. Abstracts of up to 500 words should be submitted to:

wasteconference2017.mailbox@bbk.ac.uk by the 1st of May 2017. Please also include a short bio (no more than 150 words), contact details, and any institutional or industry affiliation.

Possible paper topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Pollution and toxicity (e.g. physical / metaphorical, environmental, social)
  • Junk, dirt and rubbish (e.g. the abject, hygiene, creation of)
  • Decomposition and decay (e.g. illness, corpses, physical ‘wasting’)
  • The temporality of waste (e.g. ‘wasting time’, aging and depletion)
  • The geography of waste (e.g. LULUs, derelict spaces, wastelands)
  • Literatures of waste (e.g. fiction about waste, recycling, printing)
  • Human waste / Wasted humans (e.g. bodily matter, biopolitics of disposability)
  • Petrocultures and industrial waste (e.g. extraction, environmental damage of)
  • Economies of waste (e.g. commodification, the cost of waste, disposal industries).

Following the conference, there will be the opportunity to submit papers for a Special Collection in the Open Library of Humanities (8000 words, peer reviewed) and Alluvium Journal (2000 words, non-peer reviewed).

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ACT UP Thirty Years Fighting AIDS – 1-2 June 2017

The registration for the conference “ACT UP: Thirty Years Fighting AIDS” is now open!

Register at: http://store.york.ac.uk/product-catalogue/history-of-art/actup-thirty-years-fighting-aids.

ACT UP Thirty Years Fighting AIDS

University of York (UK)

June 1st – 2nd, 2017 

2017 is the 30th anniversary of the founding of ACT UP, the international advocacy group fighting to end the AIDS crisis. During the AIDS crisis ACT UP played a fundamental part in the fight against AIDS, promoting a social awareness of the disease. Today, the organization continues to fight, leading educational campaigns all over the world. To coincide with the anniversary of its foundation, we are please to organise the conference “ACT UP: Thirty Years Fighting  AIDS”.

The conference will take place on June 2nd, 2017 at the Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul Building, University of York (UK).

Keynote speaker: Dr. Monica Pearl.

The conference will be preceded by a screening of “United in Anger: A History of ACT UP” (2012) followed by a conversation with director Jim Hubbard and Dr. Monica Pearl.

During the event a selection of interviews from The ACT UP Oral History Project will be on displayed.

For the conference programme visit: https://actupthirtyyears.wordpress.com/programme/

Sign up at our Facebook event at: https://www.facebook.com/events/405364653174727/

Register now at http://store.york.ac.uk/product-catalogue/history-of-art/actup-thirty-years-fighting-aids!

 

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CHASE EU Conference Working Group – call for support

CHASE EU Conference Working Group

We are looking for postgraduate students at CHASE institutions to join a working group to help organise The CHASE European Conference. This is a fantastic opportunity to gain experience organising an international conference, and collaborate with colleagues from across CHASE institutions. As a member of the working group you will be involved with all stages of organisation, from helping to draft the upcoming funding application, shaping the theme, to approaching speakers and participants.

The CHASE European Conference: Thinking Through Brexit aims to bring together graduate students and academics from across the CHASE consortium to discuss the future of Arts and Humanities research in the face of the UK’s exit from the EU. Based at either the Paris or Brussels campuses of the University of Kent, the event would include two days of events on the practical and cultural consequences of the Brexit vote for HEI institutions, encouraging CHASE-European collaboration. Through keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops and practice-based / artistic responses, it is hoped that new networks form between CHASE students, academics and their EU-based colleagues to foster interdisciplinary ways of thinking through ‘Brexit’.

No specific research interests in the EU are necessary to be part of the working group, just enthusiasm for the project and willingness to get involved!

If you are interested in getting involved please email Leah Sidi: lsidi01@mail.bbk.ac.uk

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