Throughout the year, the Bell Library sponsors or co-sponsors a variety of special events: lectures, conferences, performances, receptions, and other cultural activities. Check this page regularly for new links and listings! And don't forget to investigate our Exhibits and Annual Lecture pages, too.

Upcoming Events


Rutherford Aris Memorial Lecture

28 February 2019

7:00 p.m. Elmer L. Andersen Library, Room 120 (1st floor)

"Archives, Paper, and the State under the Fatimids," will be presented by Professor Marina Rustow, Department of History, Princeton University. 

Professor Rustow is a social historian of the medieval Middle East and a 2015 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.  She works on the Cairo Geniza, a cache of more than 300,000 folio pages preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, some Arabic papyri and paper documents.  Her research centers primarily on Egypt and Syria from the 10th to the 15th centuries.  Her research centers around related questions such as:  what makes social and religious groups cohere and fragment; how people demanded justice of the state and facilitated or resisted its extraction of resources; how written documents structured the exercise of power and the creation and maintenance of social bonds; and how reconstructing the concrete details of medieval life demand of the historian a use of the imagination that is rigorous rather than fanciful.  Her first book was Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (2008).

Reservations recommended -- link will posted soon.

The James Ford Bell Library is pleased to co-sponsor this Center for Medieval Studies event.  Professor Rutherford Aris was a good friend to the Bell Library and a member of the board of the Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, our friends group.



 

 

 

 

 

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