Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Jan 2015
12:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location
University of Pennsylvania English Graduate Lounge, Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 330
Category(ies) No Categories
LECTURE by Professor Kim Phillips
Wednesday, January 28th, 12:00-2:00 PM
Fisher-Bennett Hall, Graduate Lounge
A catered lunch will be served.
Profesor Kim Phillips, Department of History, University of Auckland
http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/people/kphi025
“Strange Encounters: European Travelers in Asia c. 1245- c. 1500”
The lecture will discuss the travelers’ narratives of more than twenty Europeans who made journeys to present-day Mongolia, China, India, Sri Lanka,
and southeast Asia between the mid-thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries. These diplomats, missionaries and merchants constructed a European vision of Asia that was by turns critical, neutral, and admiring. Placing medieval writing on the East in the context of an emergent Europe whose explorers sought to learn more than to rule, the lecture seeks to complicate our understanding of medieval attitudes toward the foreign.
Kim Phillips works on representations of foreign lands and peoples in late medieval travel and ethnographic writing. She recently published Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245-1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She has begun work on a new book project on foreign women in medieval European writing on Irish, Scandinavian, Asian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures with the working title Other Women: Writing Foreign Femininities in Medieval Texts.