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Wednesday, February 26, 3:30 PM in 100 Gregory Hall
Kalani Craig: "Designing for the Future, Informing the Past: Digital Tool and Methods Design as History Research"
Please join us for a lecture by medievalist Kalani Craig (Indiana-University, Bloomington). Professor Craig is a digital historian who designs digital tools and platforms that shape new historical methods, help faculty and students alike undertake collaborative research with those methods, and model ways to engage the public using those tools. As part of this broad mission, she has developed expertise in computational text analysis, network analysis, user-driven approaches to digital-history and digital-humanities tool-building, and community-engaged digital public history. From 2017 to 2024, she was co-director of the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities. Prior to returning to the scholarly world, she spent ten years managing websites and the technical and creative people responsible for creating those websites.
February 28-March 1 in Levis Faculty Center, 210
The Mediterranean Seminar's winter workshop on The Multilingual Mediterranean will feature two keynote lectures open to the public:
Friday, 2/28 at 5:00pm:
Dwight Reynolds (Religious Studies, UC Santa Barbara) ~ Multilingualism and Multimusicality in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean
People often sing in languages they cannot speak and often listen to songs in languages they do not understand. A statement so obvious it hardly seems worth mentioning, except that we rarely ask what the implications of this common human behavior are for cultural interactions over time and space. Through the process of contra factum, new words (often in a new language) are set to old melodies, and old texts are set to new melodies. The result is a complex network of lyrics and melodies criss-crossing the Mediterranean, being performed by musicians, and for audiences, who may or may not understand the language of the words. What can this fascinating situation tell us about cultural contacts and exchanges over time in the Mediterranean region?
Saturday, 3/1 at 10am:
William Stroebel (Comparative Literatures and Modern Greek, University of Michigan) ~ Literature's Refuge at the Aegean Borderscape
The Greco-Turkish Population Exchange of 1923 was the first internationally legitimated project of forced deracination in modern history. Nearly 1.5 million Anatolian Christians were uprooted to Greece, while nearly half a million Muslims of Greece were uprooted to Turkey, “unmixing the Near East" through ethnic partition. Amidst the experience of mass ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, whose stories were cited and whose were slighted? This talk aims to recover something of the rich refugee literatures that fell through the cracks of the modern border regime, straddling Greek Orthodoxy and Sunni Islam, Greek-script, Arabic-script, and Latin-script literary traditions. Drawing from my forthcoming book Literature’s Refuge, I will bring together two unlikely interlocutors: the Tuḫfe-i Şānī be zebān-ı yūnānī (Şani's Gift in the Greek Tongue), an Ottoman-era work of Arabic-script Greek vernacular poetry, and Mehmet Yashin's Σηνηρδησ̇ι Σαατλερ (The Deported Hours), a contemporary Cypriot novel written partially in Greek-script Turkish.
Tuesday, March 11th at 5:00pm in LCLB 1080 (Lucy Ellis Lounge)
Medieval Colloquium with Professor James Clark (University of Exeter, UK): The Lost Books of Medieval England
Eighty years ago, the legendary bibliographer Neil Ker estimated that, for every manuscript book now surviving from medieval England, another twenty had been lost. Given what we have learned since about medieval book production, authorship, institutional libraries, and diverse patterns of independent reading, the scale of the loss may be nearer twice that figure. In fact, the conventional view of the learned and literary culture of medieval communities has been established based upon an unrepresentative minority of volumes that were saved by accident or an individual’s design. How might it change if, instead, we looked to the lost?
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