Empires of Faith Seminar Series, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Wednesdays during Michaelmas Term, 5:00 pm

Conceived as an accompaniment to the Ashmolean exhibition Imagining the Divine, the Empires of Faith research project is pleased to announce a series of weekly seminars on art and religions in Late Antiquity.

The series is intended to engage with questions explored by the Empires of Faith project’s team over the past four years. Speakers from diverse fields will present aspects of their work and consider methodological approaches to the history and art of the first millennium AD. The papers will focus on problems of religious identity in relation to material culture, case-studies of the metamorphoses of ancient sites and the transmission of visual forms, as well as complex issues of modern historiography and museums as an artificially constructed environment. All of them will explore and question the ways in  which we can think of and imagine the divine in Late Antiquity.  

Schedule
11 October (Week 1)
Phil Booth (Oxford)
Crucible of the Copts: Empire and faith in seventh-century Egypt

18 October (Week 2)
Richard Hobbs (London)
Representing belief on silver plate in late Antiquity

25 October (Week 3)
Susan Walker(Oxford)
Man with a mission: Charles Wilshere, a Victorian collector of early Christian and Jewish antiquities

1st of November (Week 4)
Nadia Ali (London)
Qusayr 'Amra and the continuity of post-classical art in early Islam: Towards an iconology of forms

8th of November (Week 5)
Alain George (Oxford)   
The temple, church and first mosque at Damascus: New perspectives

15th of November (Week 6)
Michele Minardi (Bordeaux)
Chorasmian gods. Images of Zoroastrian deities throughout antiquity

22nd of November (Week 7)
Maria Cristina Carile (Bologna)
Re-approaching the late antique and medieval art of Ravenna: Visuality and artistic culture of a Mediterranean city

29th of November (Week 8)
Mattia Guidetti (Vienna)
Churches and mosques in early medieval Syria