Idyll and Epiphany in the Mosaics of Ancient Corint, Greece
Monday, October 28, 5 p.m., Art Building West, 240
Betsey Robinson, Visiting Scholar in Art History - School of Art, Art History, and Design
David H. Price is a professor in the departments of Jewish studies, religious studies, art history, and history at Vanderbilt University. He is one of ten scholars to visit the University of Iowa this year as an Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor.
What Does Judaism Look Like? The Invention of Visual Toleration in the Enlightenment
Tuesday, October 29, 4:30-5:30 p.m., 116 Art Building West
In 1721-25, the Amsterdam artist Bernard Picart produced some of the most influential representations of Jews and Judaism in European history. These transformative engravings, which became the most reproduced images of Jewish life in the early modern period, supported the expansion of religious toleration. David H. Price discusses Picart’s representational principle of authenticity and his promotion of works by Leon Modena and Manasseh ben Israel, two innovative rabbis who wrote about Judaism for Christian audiences.
Redefining Judaism or Defending Judaism in the Enlightenment? Moses Mendelssohn and the Quest for Emancipation
Wednesday, October 30, 4:30-5:30 p.m., Senate Chamber, Old Capitol
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) is widely recognized as the most innovative German-Jewish thinker of the Enlightenment. He maintained friendships with notable Christian intellectuals of the time, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and published a wide variety of works concerning aesthetics, religion, and philosophy. The debate concerning Mendelssohn’s legacy continues today: Do his accomplishments reflect an assimilation to European Christian culture or the preservation of Jewish tradition? David H. Price approaches this question by engaging deeply with Mendellsohn’s oeuvre in the context of the Haskalah, i.e., the Jewish Enlightenment: “Let us retain the freedom of thought and speech with which the Father of all humankind has endowed us as our inalienable heritage and immutable right” (Jerusalem, 1783).
Classicists at the End of the World: Constantinople 1453
Thursday, November 7, 2024 4:30pm to 6:00pm, Adler Journalism and Mass Communication Building
Anthony Kaldellis is the Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, University of Chicago.
The siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a traumatic event for the city’s defenders. After being bombarded by the world’s largest cannons for almost two months, they were all enslaved, if not killed, though some were ransomed. Among them were men trained in classical Greek and Latin, including teachers and students of ancient literature, who viewed the siege through the lens of their education and wrote our eye-witness sources for it afterward. In this lecture, Anthony Kaldellis will explore the classicists’ experience of 1453 and the impact of the city’s fall on the history of classical scholarship.
