PROJECTS

In this project we explore East African towns as nodal points connecting individual African traders from the southern African interior, the northern coastal and the transoceanic trade networks with the Far East, India, Europe, and the Middle East. During the Middle Ages, increasingly after the ninth century, East African towns were important centers of production and venues where trans-continental exchange of goods and natural resources, including human beings, took place.

The city of Jerusalem was and continues to be perceived as a site of convergence between heaven and earth by Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the globe.  This belief has shaped the development of interrelated textual and artistic traditions centered on the idea of Jerusalem as a sacred city.  Jerusalem has and continues to attract a remarkable diversity of people from across the world in times of both peace and war.  For those who never journeyed to the city, the idea of Jerusalem motivated the creation of books, art, and architecture that facilitated an imaginary experience of the Holy City’s past, present, and future. 

Of all the legendary material produced during the era of the Crusades, the kingdom of Prester John has proven to be unmatched in its influence on the European imagination. The International Prester John Project allows the viewer to experience the legend’s unfolding, piece by piece, as it swept up half of the world, from 1150 to 1700. The project traces the story of Prester John across the centuries during which legendary material accrued, alongside the geographies the myth touched and helped shape. By plotting the proposed locations of John’s kingdom in line with understandings of the globe contemporary to these conjectures, one begins to see the degree to which the Prester John legend helped Europeans explore the peripheries of the world, as understood by the medieval and early modern West.

Illuminated manuscripts allow us to glimpse the real and imagined worlds of medieval artists, patrons, thinkers, writers, pilgrims, and travelers. In a time before the borders of cities, nations, and even continents were clearly defined or established, individuals could turn to texts – including epic romances, world histories, encyclopedias, travel literature, and sacred writings – to learn about distant lands and peoples. Many of these accounts were accompanied by stunning illuminations, which gave life to a world that was otherwise accessible only to indomitable travelers or a vibrant imagination.

Monsters are endemic to cultures throughout the world, present in mythological, religious, scientific, geographical, ethnographical, sociological, historical, and epistemological art and literature. Over the past twenty years, there has been an exponential increase in the production of serious scholarship on monsters and the monstrous, sometimes categorized as Monster Studies (wherein monsters are an area of investigation) or Monster Theory (wherein monsters become an analytical tool for the investigation of other cultural phenomena). Most studies are conducted within regional disciplines, though monsters, in their very nature, their embodiments, their behaviors, and their motions cross boundaries willfully, gloriously, violently, and wondrously. This project, Monsters of the Global Middle Ages, seeks contributions considering monsters and monstrous figures from throughout the medieval globe, especially those that set monsters of one region or culture in conversation with monsters of another.

North of Byzantium (NoB) explores the history, art, and culture of the northern frontiers of the Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through annual events, publications, and resources, the initiative addresses issues of visual eclecticism in art and architecture, patronage, the transfer of artistic ideas and styles, and charts how cross-cultural exchange operated in regions of the Balkan Peninsula, the Carpathian Mountains, and further north, which developed at the crossroads of the Latin, Greek, Slavic, and Islamic cultural spheres.

The project brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines and specialties with a special interest and a unique, sometimes idiosyncratic “take” on ivory—all aspects of the material—its identification, origin and manufacture, how it traveled across the world, and its importance culturally as well as economically. “Global Ivory”—invites colleagues from diverse disciplines to contribute short occasional pieces—generic or theoretical—ways of approaching or conceptualizing the subject of study. More often than not, these short, compelling narratives focus on one object alone that epitomizes something important about ivory in this time-frame. Taken together, the papers constitute a mosaic of impressions and appreciations of ivory (“stories”) as an important building block in the fashioning of the global culture of the pre-modern period.

In 1998, a shipwreck was discovered off Belitung Island in the Java Sea. It contained a remarkable cargo of more than 60,000 ceramics produced in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907), as well as luxurious objects of gold and silver. Bound for Iran and Iraq, the ship provides early proof for strong commercial links between China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.