The Material Turn in Cairo Geniza Research
Marina Rustow
Johns Hopkins University
Wednesday May 13
5:00 pm
Divinity Schoo, Swift Common Room
University of Chicago
1025 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60647
Free, open to public. No registration required. Spaces may be limited. Light refreshments to follow.
The digital revolution has transformed Genizah research, enabling group collaboration and a closer focus on the material and visual aspects of manuscripts. This lecture will discuss how these changes have yielded unprecedented depths of information about the medieval Middle East and its Jewish communities.
Marina Rustow is the Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University. Rustow’s research focuses on the medieval Middle East, especially documentary texts from the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom for discarded papers found in the attic of a medieval synagogue. She is the author of Heresy and the Politics of Community, Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Cornell University Press, 2008) which explores how Mediterranean Jews navigated religious sectarianism and communal politics during the Fatimid period (909–1171), among other things by fighting out communal conflicts in state-run institutions.
The Oriental Institute and the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago are pleased to present this lecture series accompanying the special exhibit A Cosmopolitan City: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Old Cairo This lecture is generously supported by the Oriental Institute, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago.
