Discussant: Rebecca Gould, Professor of Islamic World and Comparative Literature, University of Birmingham

Please register in advance for the webinar here: http://myumi.ch/zxMb0

After registration, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to join the webinar.

The Caucasus and its adjacent regions have long been conceptualized as a meeting place of many scripts, peoples, societies, and empires. The history of the Caucasus in general, and Armenia in particular, is replete with examples of individuals and groups reworking – or resisting – artistic, social, and religious elements from their neighbors in a complex and ongoing process of cultural negotiation, transcending any single language or territory.

This workshop will examine the history of the Caucasus from a long-neglected site of encounter – the combination and recombination of multiple media and forms of cultural production. In what ways might, for instance, medieval Armenian ballads, heterographic wonder tales, or modern filmmaking mediate different histories of shared, fraught space? How do the past and present meet and negotiate the meaning of the other in various forms of cultural labor? Or, more simply: how might a history of this space and its shared regions morph and shift across different media?

If there is anything we can do to make this event accessible to you, please contact us at armenianstudies@umich.edu. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the university to arrange.

Image caption: A convergence of scripts: the Armenian and Georgian alphabets in a Syriac manuscript.

Image credit: Saint Mark’s Monastery, Jerusalem, 295, digitized by the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library