Professor Emma Dillon, Thurston Dart Professor of Music (Medieval Music and Cultures), King’s College London.
Emma Dillon is Professor of Medieval Music and Cultures at King’s College London. Her research focuses on European musical culture from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Her work ranges widely in terms of repertories, sources, and methodological approach, and broadly speaking falls at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, medieval studies, and the history of material texts.
She is the author of Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260–1330 (Oxford University Press in 2012), and numerous articles exploring the place of sound and music in medieval culture, including studies of the afterlives of medieval music. She is completing a book, Singing Knights: Living with Songs in the Age of French Romance, 1170–1220, exploring relationships between trouvère songs, medieval romance and documentary culture.
Lecture:
Belonging with Songs: Towards an Historical Anthropology of Medieval French Song
Why do we sing? How does singing shape how we see ourselves and how we relate to one another? My talk takes up these universal questions in the context of a medieval song community. It explores an early medieval French song tradition (trouvère songs) as a social practice, linked to specific people and social networks, spanning the Mediterranean, and to other forms of social activity. I share a case study of four first-generation trouvères, using new video recordings of their works, and shows how songs, charters and seals foster a sense of belonging to a community c. 1200. My talk also introduces the UKRI-funded project, Musical Lives, which takes further the possibility of song-centred histories through interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars and performers. For more about the MUSLIVE project, see: https://muslive.kcl.ac.uk/
Dr Kate Franklin, Associate Professor of Armenian Art and Architecture, History of Art and Architecture, Tufts University.
Kate Franklin is Associate Professor of Armenian Art and Architecture in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. An anthropological archaeologist and cultural historian of medieval Armenia and the Silk Road, Kate has researched landscape, architecture and material culture of the high middle ages in the Republic of Armenia for nearly two decades.
Her first monograph, Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia (UC Press 2021) examines the medieval worldmakings of the Silk Road from the doorway of a caravan inn in the Armenian highlands. Her second book co-authored with Michael Bintley, is Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge 2023), an interdisciplinary examination of the idea of nature as constructed and enacted across the medieval world, and in modern memory of the middle ages. Kate is currently working on a number of projects, including archival work on Soviet heritage-making, epigraphic approaches to medieval political ecologies, and a literary and art-historical as well as archaeological exploration of the late medieval world of bishop Step’anos Orbelyan’s universal history of Syunik.
lecture
Time Travels and the Possibility of Redemption in a Fragmented Armenian Manuscript
This paper considers the making of art as a work of speculation, of speculative fabrication, even of speculative fiction. My comments are oriented around a dismembered and recently remembered manuscript produced in 1311 in the scriptorium at Gladzor, in the southern regions of what is now the Republic of Armenia. The manuscript, now in fragments across multiple collections, was produced at a time when future-thinking was a source of great anxiety and extreme importance to historians, writers, and artists like the young painter T’oros Sarkawag (T’oros the Deacon). These artists and scholars found themselves, to quote the frustrated sci-fi author William Gibson, off the edge of the table, suspended between the end of time and its redemption. The exquisitely present, surprisingly intimate gospel illuminations created by T’oros invite us to think about the construction of emotional communities within the space of memory, in the temporal collapse of prayer, lamentation, and mourning. Considered in the context of the monastic community excavated at Gladzor by archaeologists in the 1970s, and the transforming landscape which surrounded him, T’oros’ painterly time travels reveal a hope placed in art’s ability to bend space and time, to sustain life, and to create futures.
Professor Leah DeVun, History, Rutgers University.
Leah DeVun is Professor of History at Rutgers University in the United States. DeVun is the author of the prize-winning books The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance and Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time. DeVun is also co-editor of “Trans*Historicities” a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her work focuses on the history of gender and sexuality, science and medicine, and the history of Christianity.
lecture
Impossible Pasts and Possible Futures: Trans and Nonbinary History in the Middle Ages, and in this Moment
This lecture focuses on the history of individuals who allegedly crossed or confounded sex or gender categories in Latin Europe c. 400-1400. Ranging widely across premodern European thought and culture, DeVun explores how and why efforts to define “the human” so often hinged on ideas about nonbinary sex and gender. Right now, in the United States, hundreds of new anti-LGBTQ+ laws are being proposed or enacted, including rules that restrict teaching about queer, nonbinary, and transgender history. DeVun explores how premodern thinkers deemed certain bodies and genders “impossible,” a practice that both anticipates and challenges modern systems of sex and gender. In a moment in which writing and teaching about LGBTQ+ history has also become, for some, impossible, this lecture casts new light on a complex past, and it considers possible futures for the field of LGBTQ+ history — and for queer, nonbinary, and trans people living now.