Events

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).

  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/.

Dr. Michael D. Danti, FSA (PhD, University of Pennsylvania 2000) will give the Spring 2017 MEMS Colloquium Lecture, cosponsored by the Dresher Center Humanities Forum, Ancient Studies, Political Science, and Visual Arts. Danti has 25 years experience directing archaeological projects in the Middle East, including excavations and surveys in Syria, Iran, and Iraqi Kurdistan. From 1991–2010, his research focused on the Early Bronze Age site of Tell es-Sweyhat near Raqqa and Aleppo on the Euphrates River.  He is Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Boston University, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a Consulting Scholar, University of Pennsylvania Museum. His work includes archaeological research on the recent looting and destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria. Danti serves as a consultant for the U.S. Department of State.  He will discuss ancient and medieval archaeological sites and treasures which have been destroyed or affected and report on what he and his colleagues are doing to address this cultural heritage crisis.

Professor Danti is the Academic Director of ASOR Cultural Heritage Initiatives, an international, collaborative effort to respond to the destruction of cultural heritage in Syria and northern Iraq. ASOR has assembled a team of scholars with professional connections to leading academic and cultural institutions in Syria, Iraq, the United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, Lebanon, and Jordan. Groups of concerned citizens in Syria and Iraq have been taking action, and ASOR formed alliances and partnerships with these groups.

Free concert.  To reserve a ticket follow the link.

This free First Friday concert series on the Walters’ Sculpture Court features a different group of dynamic faculty and student performers from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University each month.

In medieval Europe, the walled garden with fragrant flowers, herbs, sweet breezes, bird songs, and a gurgling fountain was idealized as a place of delight for the senses and escape from the tumult of everyday cares. Such aspects of life inspired works of art that stirred all the senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch—and that are the focus of the ground-breaking international loan exhibition A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe, at the Walters from October 16, 2016 to January 8, 2017.

The exhibition brings together more than 100 works representative of the late medieval period—roughly the 12th to the 15th century—to explore how the senses enhance the experience of art. . . and how art triggers sensate experience. Included are stained glass, precious metals and gemstones, ivories, tapestries, paintings, prints, and illuminated manuscripts from public and private collections in the U.S. and abroad.

This exhibition runs from October 16 2016 through January 8 2017

A Feast for the Senses: Art and Experience in Medieval Europe has been organized by the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, in partnership with the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota.

This exhibition received major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor; the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the National Endowment for the Arts; and anonymous donors, with additional support from the Gary Vikan Exhibition Fund, Nanci and Ned Feltham, and the Helen Hughes Trust. The accompanying catalogue was made possible by an anonymous donor. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, or the National Endowment for the Arts.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

Asian Studies Lecture 

 

 “Reflections in a Yoshiwara Mirror: Representing the 'Beauties of the Azure Towers' in Print,” Professor Julie Nelson Davis, Professor of the History of Art (Modern East Asian), University of Pennsylvania.

 

Abstract: In 1776 publishers Tsutaya Jūzaburō and Yamazaki Kinbei issued The Mirror of Yoshiwara Beauties, Compared.  Featuring sumptuous illustrations by two leading painters, Kitao Shigemasa and Katsukawa Shunshō, this album exploited full-color multiple block printing to represent the glamorous “beauties” of the licensed pleasure district, the Yoshiwara.  This presentation will explore issues of collaboration between the publishers and painters as well as their larger social and economic network. By reading the album against guidebooks to the district, this talk further addresses how images and text operated to promote the fantasies of the quarter for its audiences.

The UMBC MEMS Minor welcomes Professor Bernadette Andrea,

Celia Jacobs Endowed Professor of British Literature at the University of Texas, San Antonio

Dr. Andrea will visit UMBC on Tuesday, September 27, to speak on

 

The Islamicate Geographies of “The Female Wits” on the Early Modern English Stage

During the second half of the seventeenth century, both the suppression of the public stage and its “restoration” along with the monarchy were represented through shifting signifiers of Islam, most of them distorted by English ignorance and prejudice.  Such signifiers range from Oliver Cromwell’s depiction as a “Turkish tyrant” to Charles II’s portrayal as the polygamous “Grand Signior.” The first production to test the ban on public performances—William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes in 1656—featured a Muslim character as its protagonist. John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, which launched the genre of Restoration heroic drama in 1670, followed Davenant’s lead. It is within this ideological framework that English women found new opportunities for public expression as actresses, patrons, and playwrights. While other women penned and even performed plays during the Restoration, the sustained professional career of Aphra Behn, who bore the orientalist epithet “Loves great Sultana,” set the stage for the epochal season of 1695/96, when a group of female playwrights debuted together for the first time in English theatrical history: Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley, and Mary Pix.  Two of their plays contain explicitly Islamicate themes, whereas none of the male playwrights for this season followed suit.  This presentation assesses these plays, and others by “the female wits,” with attention to their “imaginative geographies” (in Edward Said’s phrase) and how their gendered themes shape a discourse of competing empires.

Dr. Andrea's  recent books include English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies [University of Toronto], 2012); Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, with Linda McJannet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007)