Making History, Thinking Historically: Medieval & Early Modern Conceptions & Representations - Day 1

Date
Thu November 7th 2019, 4:30 - 6:30pm
Event Sponsor
Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Humanities Center, Department of Art & Art History, Center for South Asia, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University Libraries, History Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, David Rumsey Map Center
Location
Stanford Humanities Center / David Rumsey Map Center
Making History, Thinking Historically: Medieval & Early Modern Conceptions & Representations - Day 1

This year's two-day Primary Source Symposium focuses on how textual and material sources reflect, represent, or recreate historical time, and how time and history are constructed and presented through different sources, from architecture to court documents. Stanford's Primary Source Symposium is centered on the presentation and analysis of primary sources: textual and cartographic, as well as works of art, architecture, and music. In this symposium, scholars present works from within their discipline to an interdisciplinary audience. These presentations share a concern with how time and history are realized within medieval and early modern sources, with an eye to unearthing past understandings and approaches to history and time. How did the source construct or present history? What does the source reveal about the concepts of history and time in a particular time and place? How does the source reflect, distort, or represent time? Speakers address four different areas related to the symposium topic:

  • Building historical claims: architecture as a means of historical construction
  • Mapping the past: cartographic representations of history
  • Reforming history: reformations of historical memory
  • Sounding temporality: music and sound in the representation of time

Organized by Prof. Laura Stokes (History) and Prof. Barbara Pitkin (Religious Studies), the conference will feature presentations by: Prof. Euan Cameron (Columbia and Union Theological Seminary); Prof. Fatima Quraishi (University of California, Riverside); Prof. Kathryn Starkey (Stanford); Prof. Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford); Prof. Nancy Kollmann (Stanford); Dr. Surekha Davies (John Carter Brown Library); Prof. Carina Johnson (Pitzer); Prof. Tunç Şen (Columbia); and Prof. David Como (Stanford).