18th Annual Symposium
“Religious Communities Across Space and Time in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East”
March 4-5, 2022
The Darmstadt Haggadah, c. 1420
The Marco Institute’s 18th annual symposium brings together scholars of the medieval and early modern world to examine how religious communities conceptualized and imagined themselves. The symposium will feature specialists whose geographic interests include Africa, the Middle East and Europe. “Community,” therefore, will be interpreted broadly to include not only world systems such as oikumene, ummah or ecclesia, but also local communities such as individual mosques, monasteries or synagogues. Furthermore, papers will investigate how interactions between religious communities shaped their identities and experiences. The symposium will explore the diversity and complexity of pre-modern notions of religious communities across a wide range of geographic, confessional and temporal boundaries.
The “Religious Communities” Symposium is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Symposium committee: Manuela Ceballos, Matthew Bryan Gillis, Felege Yirga.
Keynote:
Emily Gottreich, University of California, Berkeley
“The Jewish umma: Middle Eastern and North African Jewry and the Development of an Islamicate Community”
Speakers
Sean Anthony, The Ohio State University, “The Ummah and the Arabs: Ethnicity and Ideology in the Formation of the Early Islamic Polity”
Felege Yirga, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “Remembering Rome and Performing Romanness in the Post-Roman World: The Chronicle of John of Nikiu”
Michael Moore, University of Iowa, “Saved from the Gates of Hell: Prayer for the Dead at Cluny”
Mikael Muehlbauer, Columbia University, “Architectural Hybridity at the Lalibela Church Complex”
Robert Clines, Western Carolina University, “A City for (Almost) Every Nation: Diversity and Exclusion in Gregory Martin’s Rome”
Matthew Bryan Gillis, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “Pious Heroes and Monstrous Foes in Carolingian War Poetry”
Molly Lester, US Naval Academy, “Heretical Rites & Disordered Customs: Discerning Orthodox Liturgies among Christian Communities in Early Medieval Iberia”
Kristina Richardson, CUNY, “Ottoman Romani in 1410s Germany: Muslim Apostates, Christian Converts”
Michael Gomez, New York University, “Islam as a (Surprisingly) Diverse Community, or Set of Communities, in Medieval West Africa”
Claudia Rapp, University of Vienna, “Experts and Amateurs: Religious Communities across Time and Space in Byzantium”