Mediaevalia, hosted at the Lilly Library, is an annual conference organized jointly by our Medieval Studies Institute and the Lilly Library. Scholars present history and study from manuscripts and early prints to students and faculty. The presentation seeks to give students a concrete understanding of what information the material aspects of a book can provide during the Late Antiquity to Reformation period.
Join us for 2024 Mediaevalia on February 28 and 29
Dr. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh (University of California, Davis) will present a public lecture titled “Survivor Object: The modern life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Church to Museum” and host a workshop.
Workshop: Thursday, February 29th 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East, including architectural preservation, museums, and cultural heritage. Her first book, on the architecture of Aleppo, Syria, received the book Award for urban history from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, published by Stanford University Press in 2019, is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. The book also won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and it was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (non-fiction).
Her scholarly publications have won Best Article Prizes from the Syrian Studies Association and from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the President of the University of California. Professor Watenpaugh has served on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Historians of Islamic Art Association, the Syrian Studies Association, and is currently on the board of the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus. She is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
In addition to scholarly essays, Heghnar Watenpaugh’s writing has appeared in Newsweek and The Los Angeles Times andwas featured in a BBC podcast series about cultural heritage destroyed during the Syrian conflict. In recognition of this work she was selected as a Public Scholarship Faculty Fellow by the University of California Davis.
The College of Arts