Our meetings are open, but a RSVP is required. Columbia University’s COVID guidelines apply to our in-person meetings: https://news.columbia.edu/news/update-covid-19-university-guidance. If you have any concerns or questions, please do not hesitate to write to me (dar2111 [at] columbia.edu).
Details for our meetings in 2024/2025 will be posted as they become available. As in the last years, I expect to schedule both hybrid and ZOOM only events. Hybrid events will be accessible to both ZOOM and in-person participants. The in-person participants will convene in the Faculty House on Columbia’s Morningside campus (64 Morningside Drive, New York, NY 10027; for directions, please click here; for accommodation of access, please see below).
Fall 2024
October 1, 2024, 5 pm (NYC, Faculty House & ZOOM) – Jonathan Peterson (Columbia University), Disfiguring the Divine: Vyāsa’s Body between Polemic and Procession
October 29, 2024, 5 pm (NYC, ZOOM only) – David Hollenberg (University of Oregon): Reverend Easson’s Burden: A Nineteenth-Century Nusayri Manuscript between Ottoman Reform and an American Missionary’s Enthusiasm
Spring 2025
February 11, 2025, noon (NYC, ZOOM only) – Verena Böll (Independent Scholar, Dresden): “Judas or John – Who Kissed Jesus? A Revealing Caption in an Ethiopian Manuscript”
The seminar will explore the moment of betrayal, when Judas is kissing Jesus (Matthew 26:49), as illustrated in the Gospel of Marṭula Māryām (for a digital surrogate, see HMML EMDA 00064, https://w3id.org/vhmml/readingRoom/view/138192). The seventeenth-century parchment codex of the Goǧǧām monastery, which was founded by Queen Eleni between 1490 and 1522, is one of the first Ethiopian manuscripts to depict this scene with a real kiss. The miniature’s source is a woodcut in the illustrated Arabic-Latin gospel (Rome: Typographia Medicea, 1591, p. 127, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/gri.ark:/13960/t9770c23r?urlappend=%3Bseq=123), based on an engraving by Antonio Tempesta (1555-1630). Jesuit missionaries brought a copy of the printed Evangelium Arabicum to seventeenth-century Ethiopia. There are, however, significant differences between the late sixteenth-century Italian image and its seventeenth-century Ethiopian adaptation, especially as in the Ge’ez text it is John, and not Judas, who is kissing Jesus. In the seminar I will analyze the interplay between iconography, caption, and narratives about Judas Iscariot in the Gospel and the Ethiopian tradition in order to explain Ethiopian theology, thereby providing new insights into the transmission of knowledge between Ethiopia and Europe in the seventeenth century.
April 29, 2025, 5pm (NYC) – Johannes Makar (Harvard University): “Cultivating Gardens of Knowledge: Copts and the Waṭan in Khedival Egypt.”
Columbia University encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. University Seminar participants with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations may contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or [email protected]. Disability accommodations, including sign-language interpreters, are available on request. Requests for accommodations must be made two weeks in advance.
The official page of the Columbia University Seminar 751 is available at: http://universityseminars.columbia.edu/seminars/religion-and-writing/. For more information about the seminar’s history, please see: https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/usem751history/. The abstracts of all talks since January 2012 are archived at: https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/islamicbooks/religionwriting/abstracts/
Dagmar A. Riedel, chair
Columbia University
dar2111 [at] columbia.edu
Heidi Hansen, rapporteur
Columbia University
Department of History
heh2135 [at] columbia.edu
First published, 1 February 2012
Last updated, 9 January 2025