Fall 2009 Crossroads Lecture by David Nirenberg

On September 8, 2009, in the University Room of Hyde Hall, Professor David Nirenberg, University of Chicago, spoke on “Poetry, Art, and the Danger of Judaism: from Saint Paul to the Present.”  For information about Professor Nirenberg, see http://history.uchicago.edu/faculty/nirenberg.shtml.

Spring 2009 Crossroads Lecture by Daniel K. Richter

Professor Daniel K. Richter gave the Spring 2009 MEMS Crossroads Lecture on March 25, 2009, in Hyde Hall on the UNC campus. In his talk, “Exotic Goods and Cultural Power: The Politics of Native American Trade with Europeans, 1500-1800,” Professor Richter showed the audience how American Indian economic and political practices became entangled with world trade and how Indians influenced and were affected by trade with other places.

Daniel Richter is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His work centers on American Indians and their interactions with the wider early modern world. He is both a preeminent scholar of American Indian history and a pioneer in integrating American Indian history into the larger narrative of early modern history.
Professor Richter is the author of Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard, 2001), which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His first book was The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (UNC Press, 1992), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ray Allen Billington Prize from the Organization of American Historians and was named a 1994 Choice Outstanding Academic Book. Professor Richter has written and edited many other influential books, articles, and book chapters.

Fall 2008 Crossroads Lecture by Jerrilynn Doods

Professor Jerrilynn Dodds gave the 2008 MEMS Crossroads Lecture on September 18, 2008 at the Turner, Tate, Kuralt Auditorium at UNC. In her talk, “Hunting in the Borderlands: Castilians and Nasrids Forge Cultural Identities in the Paintings of the Alhambra,” Professor Dodds revisited her earlier work on the  paintings at the Alhambra, the palace of the medieval Islamic Nasrid dynasty, located in present-day Spain. She argued that hunting imagery became the means by which both Nasrids and Castilians acted out a ceremonial opposition to one another even while one was socially and culturally intertwined with the other.  Her article on this topic has since been published in the journal Medieval Encounters.

Jerrilynn Dodds is Distinguished Professor of Art History and Theory at the School of Architecture of the City College of the City University of New York, and lecturer and consultant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her work has centered on issues of artistic interchange, and how groups form their identities through art and architecture. She is known in addition as an author, curator and documentary filmmaker.

Professor Dodds is the author of “Architecture and Ideology of Early Medieval Spain” (London and University Park, 1991); “Al Andalus: The Arts of Islamic Spain” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992); “The Arts of Medieval Spain” (with Little and Williams, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993); and numerous other publications, including a book concerning the reconstruction of the historical center of Mostar in Bosnia.

Crossroads Lecture Series Inaugurated By David Abulafia

The inaugural lecture of the Crossroads Lecture Series was delivered on March 18, 2008, by Prof. David Abulafia (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University). Professor Abulafia, who has done extensive scholarly work on the economic, social, and political history of the Mediterranean lands in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, spoke on “The First Atlantic Slaves, 1350-1520: Conquest, Slavery, and the Opening of the Atlantic.”

Professor Abulafia’s extensive research into the interaction of the three religions in medieval Spain and Sicily, including the problem of Jewish (and Muslim) ’servitude,’ made him a particularly apt speaker to launch the series. One of his major interests is the opening of the eastern and western Atlantic in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with particular emphasis on the encounter of Europeans with native peoples. In his lecture on March 18, Professor Abulafia demonstrated how an Atlantic slave trade developed out of the much older Mediterranean slave trade; how it came to encompass first the Canary Islands and then West Africa; how it then became extended to the first areas of the New World to be visited by Europeans; and finally how a slave trade came to link Africa to the New World, as labor shortages in the first Spanish colonies created demand for the slaves sold by the Portuguese.

Event Sponsors: UNC College of Arts and Sciences, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS).