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Apr
7

MEMS Colloquium: "Listeners as Players, Music As Play"

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Randell Upton (UCLA)

Location

Online

Date & Time

April 7, 2021, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Description

The Medieval and Early Modern Studies minor of UMBC's Department of History hosts Dr. Elizabeth Randell Upton, an Associate Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.  Dr. Randell Upton's primary research area is medieval music. Her recent work examines late fourteenth and early fifteenth century vocal music to discover evidence for the experiences of performers and listeners in the medieval past, recorded in surviving musical notation.  
Join us on Zoom for her lecture: "Listeners as Players, Music as Play."  
For questions or further information, contact Laurel Bassett: lburgg1@umbc.edu.

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Dec
9

Mini-MEMS Lunch and Learn

Instrument to Intellectual: Italian Female Artists,1600s

Location

Online

Date & Time

December 9, 2020, 12:15 pm – 1:45 pm

Description

From Instrument to Intellectual: Portraits of Italian Women of the 16th Century

Sure, she can play the virginal, but can she paint? That was the question of Giorgio Vasari, whose seminal art history marveled at the first Italian women to become professional artists.  Dr. James Magruder will look at how the first cohort of Italian female artists depicted themselves and some of the women around them, first as gentlewomen and increasingly as intellectuals.  Where Vasari positioned them as marvels of Nature, they depicted Nature to prove their full humanity, as well as full equality with their fathers, teachers, and husbands.

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Oct
28

Mini-MEMS Lunch and Learn

Musical Instruments of the Renaissance on Zoom

Location

Online

Date & Time

October 28, 2020, 12:15 pm – 12:45 pm

Description

Want to hear a racket?  Come learn about musical instruments of the Renaissance!  (Yes, a racket IS an instrument!)  Dr. Lindsay Johnson will demo a variety of Renaissance wind instruments, from the racket (an early bass double reed) to the crumhorn (sounds like a glorified kazoo!) to the shawm (an early oboe) to the recorder) so much better than what you learned in 3rd grade!).  Come hear what these instruments sound like, see how they work, and laugh at Dr. Johnson's attempts to play them (she's actually a violinist).  Curiosity encouraged.
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Oct
29

THE ENGLISH JOAN OF ARC: Saint, Witch, Man, Maid, or Whore

MEMS Fall Colloquium Lecture, Gail Orgelfinger

Location

Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn

Date & Time

October 29, 2019, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

Description

Because the English were ultimately responsible for executing Joan of Arc, the usual view of their changing judgments of her is a progressive one—from witch to heroine to saint. However, their opinions prove to be much more varied and nuanced, encompassing praise, blame, and uneasiness all within 200 years of her death. This talk discusses some of these complex reactions from English historians, playwrights, and biographers through the Early Modern era.

Gail Orgelfinger, Senior Lecturer of English at UMBC, Emerita, is the author of Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429–1829 (Penn State University Press, 2019).

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Mar
12

A NEW STORY OF THE BLACK DEATH

How Genetics Is Transforming Our Narratives Of The Plague

Location

Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn

Date & Time

March 12, 2019, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Description

Monica Green, Professor of History at Arizona State University, specializes in medieval European medical history and the global history of infectious diseases.  In her talk she will show how our understanding of the Black Death, the plague pandemic that ravaged Europe, the Middle East, and north Africa between 1346 and 1353, has been transformed in the last decades because of new developments in genetics. Historians and archaeologists are now learning to incorporate the findings from genetics into new narratives, ones that show that this largest of pandemics was even larger, and more widespread, than we ever imagined before. Our story must now include not only the Mediterranean and Europe, but also China and perhaps even much of sub-Saharan Africa.


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Oct
18

Visualizing Deafness

A Prehistory of Deaf Culture

Location

Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn

Date & Time

October 18, 2018, 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Description

Building on research on manual-kinetic communication in medieval and early modern Europe, Professor Jonathan Hsy suggests possibilities for a prehistory of deaf culture prior to the development of fully expressive sign languages. How did premodern people express the value of deafness as a physical condition and cultural practice? In what way can lived experience of deafness in the historical past reshape contemporary (often politicized) understandings of cultural, linguistic, or ethnic identity?

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Mar
28

The Belitung Shipwreck

Precious Metal Cargo and Global Trade in Medieval Asia

Location

Earl and Darielle Linehan Concert Hall

Date & Time

March 28, 2018, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Description

Scholar and curator John Guy explores the unique insights that shipwreck archaeology can bring to our understanding of historical trade and exchange. This unprecedented ensemble of late Tang dynasty ceramics, gold and silver, discovered in the Belitung shipwreck, throws light on both Chinese arts of the period and those of the Abbasids in the Persian Gulf, the intended clients for this ill-fated cargo which sank in the Java Sea in the early ninth century.

John Guy is the Florence and Herbert Irving Curator of the Arts of South and Southeast Asia at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London, and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  He was formerly Senior Curator of South Asia at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has served as an advisor to UNESCO on historical sites in Southeast Asia, and worked on a number of maritime excavations in Southeast Asia, most recently a circa 800 CE Arab dhow in the Gulf of Thailand. He has curated numerous international exhibitions and contributed to many publications, including journals, edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. Major books include Lost Kingdoms. Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia (2014), Interwoven Globe. The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 (co-author, 2013), Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India (co-author, 2011), Shipwrecked. Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (co-editor 2010), Indian Temple Sculpture (2007, repr. 2017), Woven Cargoes. Indian Textiles in the East (1998; repr. 2009), Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition (Chicago 1997), Indian Art and Connoisseurship (1995), and Ceramic Traditions of Southeast Asia (1989).

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Oct
4

Harmonious Monk

Martin Luther and His Reformation through Music

Location

Performing Arts & Humanities Building : Linehan Concert Hall

Date & Time

October 4, 2017, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Description

  In commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation (October 1517-October 2017),  Dr. Christopher Boyd Brown and UMBC’s Camerata and Collegium Musicum will present an interdisciplinary concert-lecture on Martin Luther’s use of music and the community practice of hymn-singing in the Protestant Reformation. Brown will discuss how Lutheran hymns, sung in the streets and homes as well as in community spaces, were central to the success of the Reformation. UMBC students will provide live musical examples of plainchant, Reformation hymns, and multi-part choral works by Walter and Bach.

Bio: Christopher Boyd Brown is Associate Professor of Church History, School of Theology, Boston University.  A recognized scholar of Martin Luther and Reformation music, he has published Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Harvard University Press, 2005), and several studies on the role of midwives in early modern Lutheranism. His translations of Luther and early modern Lutheran theological texts can be found at http://www.projectwittenberg.org/etext/luther/.






















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