Date/Time
Date(s) - 30 Nov 2012
7:00 PM - 8:15 PM
Location
Columbia University Faculty House
Category(ies) No Categories
THE ARMENIAN CENTER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESENTS
Networks of Knowledge: Communication and Identity in 12th-14th Century Armenia
Lecture by Dr. Sergio La Porta
Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies at California State University, Fresno
Friday, November 30th, 2012
7:00 pm
Columbia University Faculty House
64 Morningside Drive @ W 116th Street
Reception to Follow
We are accustomed to thinking of globalization as a modern phenomenon. While
the worlds of late antiquity and the Middle Ages may not have enjoyed the intense
and tightly connected networks that define so much of our contemporary existence,
they were interconnected and in conversation with each other. In this conversation,
Armenians functioned as conduits of intercultural contact, but maintained and developed
a distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The routes that crossed Anatolia, from Iran to the
Mediterranean and from Russia to the Middle East, are where these dynamics played
out. In this talk, Dr. La Porta will present the ways Armenians participated in important
vectors of trade and cultural interchange. He will then chart the development of how the
Armenian monastic schools of the period formed networks that created an Armenian
textual community and helped define Armenian identity in the 12th-14th centuries.