MEMS Lectures bring in scholars from otherwise disparate fields and regions to broaden and refresh our work and thinking. Teasing apart old sources to reveal such things as the thorny problems of gender, race, colonial appetites, and the interplay of devotional practices and state ideology across the premodern world challenges our reading of texts, artifacts, and the experiences that lay behind them.
2023-2024
October 25 Nazanin Heydayat Munroe (City University of New York), Sufi Lovers, Safavid Silks, and Early Modern Identity | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
January 17 Rowan Dorin (Stanford University), Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
March 27 Yanna Yannakakis (Emory University), Since Time Immemorial: Managing Difference through Custom from Medieval Iberia to Colonial Mexico | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
2022-2023
November 8 Carl Petry (Northwestern University), A Custody Dispute betweena Habashi Slave and her Jewish Owner; Issues of Gender and Ethnic/RacialIdentity in Medieval Egypt | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
February 10 Gitanjali Shahani (San Francisco State University), Blood, Fat, and Fear in Seventeenth-Century Travelogues | Virtual
March 10 Jacqueline I. Stone (Princeton University), In the Aftermath of the Divine Winds: Religious Responses to the Mongol Threat and the Medieval Reimagining of Japan | 4pm in 3222 Angel Hall
2021-2022
Novermber 12 Justin Stearn (NYU - Abu Dhabi), Revealed Sciences: Religion, Science, and the Occult in Early Modern Morocco | 1pm (Virtual)
March 22 Adriana Vasquez (UCLA), Arcadia Brasiliensis: Landscape and Colonial Dislocation in the Poetry of Cláudio Manuel da Costa | 1pm (Virtual)
2019-2020
September 19 Erik Inglis (Oberlin College), 'It Began with a Picture', or, Inventing Stories to Make Sense of Images in the European Middle Ages | 4:30pm in 180 Tappan Hall
2017-2018
October 20 Jean Campbell (Emory University) Pisanello, Adrian Stokes, and the Image of the Threshold | 3pm in 180 Tappan Hall
November 21 Massimo Montanari (University of Bologna) Eating Italy: A History of Italian Food and Italian Identity | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
April 6 Lyndal Roper (University of Oxford) Portraits of Luther, from Lucas Cranach to Today | 3pm in 1014 TIsch Hall
2016-2017
October 24 Robert Tittler (Concordia University, Montreal) Social Aspiration and the Malleability of English Portraiture, 1540-1640 | 5pm in 180 Tappan Hall
2015-2016
October 16 Andrew Casper (Miami University) Blood, Artifice, and the Resurrected Body in the Shroud of Turin | 4pm in 180 Tappan Hall
April 8 Andrew Morall (Bard College) The Cosmos of the Urban Craftsman in Early Modern Northern Europe | 4pm in 1014 Tisch Hall
