The next meeting of the Medieval Seminar will take place on Thursday September 26 at 6:00 in Burke Seminar room (see directions below) with Isabelle Levy, Columbia University.
Isabelle Levy is Lecturer and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, Columbia University. She has held positions as fellow at the Italian Academy and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at IIJS, both at Columbia, and was previously a Fulbright fellow in Spain. She is the author of Jewish Literary Eros: Between Poetry and Prose in the Medieval Mediterranean and has published articles in journals including Medieval Encounters and La Corónica and essays in edited volumes, most recently in Medieval French Interlocutions: Shifting Perspectives on a Language in Contact.
"Lyric Jewishness and Communal Belonging in the Medieval Mediterranean"
For Jewish poets of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean, composing in the local language seems to signal an attempt at social and political inclusion, whereas composing in Hebrew or in a Judeo-language might instead point to insularity, even though such poetry inevitably assimilated aspects of the local lyric. I examine examples of these two different lyric approaches, alongside instances of how non-Jewish poets used the lyric to define Jewishness, to consider how poetry by Jewish authors or about Jews negotiated aspects of communal belonging. My examples move from the frameworks of lyric practices in twelfth-century al-Andalus and thirteenth-century Christian Spain to focus on early fourteenth-century Italy.
Please RSVP to the seminar using this link by Wednesday September 18.
Holders of a Columbia University ID card will be able to access Burke Library automatically. Anyone who does not have a CU ID card and wishes to attend the Seminar must also RSVP to Jeffrey Wayno ([email protected]) by Wednesday September 25, at 5 pm. Your name will be put on a guest list at the entrance to Union.
Directions to Burke Library's conference room: Enter Union Theological Seminary at 121st Street and Broadway. Once you have scanned your ID (or, for non-affiliates, mentioned your name to the front desk attendant), take the door on the left, following signs for Burke Library. Go down the long corridor, making a quick left and a quick right. At the end of the hall (where you will see the stained glass of Francis of Assisi!), take the stores or elevator one floor up to the rotunda. The entrance to the library is right there. Once inside, take the stairs or elevator to the 3rd floor (L3). The conference room is opposite the elevator.
