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We are excited to announce that on February 25, at 6 p.m. at Sackler Auditorium Professor Ittai Weinryb from Bard Graduate Center will present his latest project, "Slipstream: Making Frontiers in Medieval Black Sea."
A frontier is an imaginary boundary that divides space into two: that which belongs to you and that which does not. It is the edge of your own human cognition; it creates a theoretical (and sometimes physical) line between the known and the unknown, designating a geographic realm where the rules of conduct and cultural practice differ from the center. Ultimately, a frontier offers ways to question conceptualizations of self and identity through geographic proclamations of alterity—mapping personal, social, and political perspectives onto the visible world. In this paper I center on the European frontier of the Black Sea during the Middle Ages by focusing on Art and Material Culture produced and consumed by missionaries and merchants in Crimea during the fourteenth century. Through a close look into how art and material culture worked to produce, define, and profess the actual and conceptual space of the frontier, I argue, a new understanding of art, habits and practices the European centers can simultaneously arise.
This is the second event of this year's New Directions in Art History: Lectures in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. With the generous support of the department, the lecture series aims to bring important new scholarship to the attention of the HAA community and give graduate students a chance to engage with innovative scholars. Needless to say, the lecture is also open to Harvard community and the public.
