2016-2017 Events
The Boston University Program in Scripture and the Arts Presents “The Unfolding of Scripture Through Movement”
The Program for Scripture and the Arts is proud to present a brief preview of the speakers featured in this coming year’s events! This posting will be updated as more details about the events become available. Mark your calendars for an exciting year of meaning in movement!
Thursday, November 3, 5:30 PM: Yolanda Covington-Ward Lecture
Lecture: Gesture and Power
Sargent (635 Commonwealth Ave), Room 102
Yolanda Covington-Ward is a professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Trained as an anthropologist, she is the author of Gesture and Power: Religion, Nationalism, and Everyday Performance in Congo (2015, Duke University Press). Her research interests revolve around the relationship between social connections, interpersonal interactions, and group identities, and how they impact and are impacted by physical bodies. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and among Liberian communities in the United States. Her lecture will focus on embodiment and religion as explored in her recent book. We are excited to bring this important work to colleagues in religion, literature, anthropology, and African studies.
Friday, November 4th, 10:00-11:00AM: Yolanda Covington-Ward
Workshop
William O. Brown Seminar Room (505), African Studies Center (232 Bay State Rd)
Professor Covington-Ward will hold a workshop for faculty and graduate students on Friday, November 4, from 10 AM -11:30 AM in the William O. Brown Seminar Room (505) in the African Studies Center (232 Bay State Rd). The workshop will be on her ongoing work on Liberian diasporas entitled “I Don’t Even Know Monrovia in the First Place”: Displaced Bodies and Shifting Identities in the Liberian Diaspora. Please RSVP for a pre-circulated paper: https://goo.gl/forms/CMPEtQg8gVbcjqxk1. More details found here.
Monday, February 13, 2:30-4:00 PM: Jeffrey S. Shoulson
Forum: Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles
Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, 2nd Floor Library (147 Bay State Rd)
Boston University Jewish Studies Research Forum and the BU Program in Scripture and the Arts are pleased to welcome Professor Jeffrey S. Shoulson. Shoulson is Doris and Simon Konover Chair of Judaic Studies, Director of the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, Professor of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is also author of Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity (2001) and Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (2013). He is also co-editor of Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (2004).
“Mapping and Unmapping Jewish History in Early Modern Bibles” will examine the role played by maps depicting the Holy Land and other biblical locations—printed in Bibles as well as in other accounts of the region—in the construction of spaces construed as “Jewish.”
Monday, March 27, 5:30 PM: Leah Lowthorp and Finnian Moore Gerety, with Frank Korom, Moderator
Lecture: Performing Sanskrit Scripture in Kerala, India
Photonics Colloquium Room, Photonics Building, 9th Floor (8 St. Mary’s Street)
Leah Lowthorp holds a dual doctoral degree in Anthropology and Folklore & Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. As part of her dissertation work on the impact of UNESCO recognition of Kūtiyāttam as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in Kerala, India, she was trained in the techniques and performance of the tradition. She has a unique ability to bridge the divide between “study of” and “participation in” this tradition, and in her lecture/demonstration she will share her perspective on “the ways artists emically conceive of rituality in relation to contemporary practice both inside and outside of the temple.”
Finnian M. Gerety holds a doctoral degree from the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He works on ritual, text, and the senses in South Asian religions, with a focus on Hindu traditions of India. He has authored an article soon to appear in The Journal of Asian Ethnology entitled “Digital Guru: Embodiment, Technology, and the Transmission of Traditional Knowledge in Kerala,” which explores the manner in which the Nambudiri Brahmins of the South Indian state of Kerala transmit “what may be the oldest surviving musical culture in South Asia, a fixed oral tradition of sacred songs used in ritual (sāmaveda). Without recourse to written notation, Nambudiri practitioners teach songs face-to-face, using their voices and a distinctive system of hand gestures to convey melodies to their students.”
Frank Korom is Professor of Religion and Anthropology at Boston University.
Monday, March 27, 2:30-3:45: Leah Lowthorp
Workshop
Workshop will be held during Professor Kyna Hamill’s TH 102, Dramatic Literature Course. All members of the BU community are welcome to attend. Please email scripart@bu.edu for more information.
Monday, April 24, 5:30 PM: Margot Fassler
Planetarium Presentation: Cosmos and Creation in the Twelfth Century: An Interpretation of Genesis 1
Boston Museum of Science Planetarium
Margot Fassler is a musicologist known for her innovative work at the intersection of music, liturgy, and theology in medieval European Christianity. Before taking up her current position in the departments of music and theology at Notre Dame, she taught for many years at the Institute for Sacred Music at Yale University, serving as director for ten years. Her most recent book, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (Yale University Press, 2011), is a prize-winning exploration of the intersections between liturgy, theology, and architecture at the famous Chartres Cathedral in France.
Her newest work on Hildegard of Bingen, supported by a Guggenheim and an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship, explores the way that liturgy, theology, music, drama, and the visual arts work together. Fassler has worked with digital artist Christian Jara and the planetarium staff at the University of Notre Dame to develop a digital model of Hildegard’s complex visualization of creation. This model of the universe, based on Hildegard’s treatise Scivias, is a full-dome digital presentation with music, created by Christian Jara and Margot Fassler, with a soundtrack by musicians from the Notre Dame Program in Sacred Music based on chants by Hildegard relating to her vision of the cosmos as it was created and spins in time toward its end.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a German nun, a prophet who wrote theological treatises, biblical commentary, nearly 400 letters, poetry and drama; she composed music, and designed art works. She was a scientist too, and had great interest in the cosmos, its creation, and its meanings as a work of divine inspiration. To display this work Fassler and Jara constructed a model depicting stages of the “Cosmic Egg,” from Hildegard’s description of a big bang within a dark chaos to a spinning and fully zoomable globe that grows through six days of development, enhanced by music composed by Hildegard as a companion to the text/illustration.