A Lecture by Professor Qianshen Bai, Boston University Department of Art History The lecture will explore the roles played by calligraphy in Chinese society, including both religious and secular uses. The linguistic foundation and aesthetic of calligraphy will also be discussed. Following the lecture, there will be a demonstration of Chinese calligraphy. An art historian […]
Sassan Tabatabai, Boston University, The Core Curriculum Dr. Tabatabai read from and discussed the poetry of Rudaki, the tenth-century poet often called “the father of Persian poetry,” whose writings he translated and published in Father of Songs: Rudaki and His Poetry (Purdue University Press, 2008). Discussion touched on the presence of Islam and the older […]
Christopher Ricks, Boston University, The Editorial Institute Work in progress on Eliot’s poems (towards a full critical edition), as well as on the publication of his letters and on the gathering of all his prose, provides an opportunity to re-consider the relations of his art to his religious beliefs – even perhaps the relations of […]
Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University, History of Art and Architecture In an age of mechanical, and now virtual, reproduction, we have perhaps lost sight of the basic visual unit that structures our experience of the medieval book: the opening. From the origins of codex as a medium in late antiquity, and in contrast to the scrolls […]
A Conversation with author Francisco X. Stork and editor Cheryl Klein Francisco X. Stork Author of Marcelo in the Real World, forthcoming from Arthur A. Levine Books, March 2009. Francisco Stork was born in 1953 in Monterrey, Mexico. Today he works in Boston as an attorney for a state agency that develops affordable housing. He […]
Frank Korom, Boston University, Department of Religion This presentation explores the changing worlds of the Patuas of West Bengal, an itinerant caste of scroll painters and singers who converted en masse from Hinduism to Islam in the thirteenth century. Originally working in a solely oral medium, they have gradually come to rely on other forms […]
Featuring James Sturm, author of The Golem’s Mighty Swing A conference organized by PhD students in Religion and Literature to explore religious content in the world of comics and graphic novels. Click here for the full list of conference sponsors and events, including paper titles.
Ramie Targoff, Brandeis University Department of English John Donne was preoccupied throughout his life with the subject of valediction. In this talk, Professor Targoff explored the ways in which this obsession with parting pervades both the erotic and devotional registers of his works, from his earliest love lyrics through his final sermons. Ramie Targoff is […]
Sharon Portnoff, Pomona College Department of Religious Studies Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man relies heavily on Dante’s Inferno to witness to his eleven-month imprisonment in the death camp Auschwitz. Beyond the more obvious trope of the journey to Hell, these two texts share the larger question: what is the human? This lecture will explore what […]
Susanna Caroselli , Luce Visiting Professor in Scripture and Visual Arts in the Department of Religion, Boston University and Professor of Art History at Messiah College “The Moralized Bible: Life’s Little Royal Instruction Book” In the early 1200s a group of lavishly illuminated Bibles was produced in Paris for members of the royal house of […]