News Archive
Conversations on the Hereford World-Map: A Work-Shop
Dr Asa Mittman, Art and Art History Department, California State University, Chico and Dr Diarmuid Scully, School of History, UCC
Wednesday 5th August, 2015
Seminar Room, Tyrconnel Building, School of History, UCC
11.45am - coffee
12noon
Introducing the Hereford Map: a window into medieval world-views
The Hereford Map’s key themes and narratives: time and space; apocalypticism, engagement with the Classical past; empire.
1pm: Break
2pm
Monsters: presences, absences and ambiguities on the Hereford Map
Defining the Monstrous in the Age of Crusade; ‘monstering’ the human other (Jews and Muslims); representing the norm – ethnicity; civilisation.
Asa Simon Mittman:
Asa Simon Mittman is Professor of Art History at California State University, Chico. He is author of Maps and Monsters in Medieval England (2006), co-author with Susan Kim of Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript (2013, awarded a Millard Meiss Publication Grant from the College Art Association), and author and co-author of a number of articles on monstrosity and marginality in the Middle Ages, including pieces on Satan in the Junius 11 manuscript (Gesta, with Kim) and “race” in the Middle Ages (postmedieval). He coedited the Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (2012), and is the founding president of MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: the Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory And Practical Application). Mittman is co-director of Virtual Mappa, with Martin Foys, an interface to allow searching and linking among medieval maps and geographical texts. His research has been supported by CAA, ICMA, Kress, Mellon, American Philosophical Society, and NEH grants. He edits book series with Boydell and Brill. Current research interests include the Franks Casket and images of Jews on medieval maps. Asa Mittman is founding member of the Material Collective, and a regular contributor to the MC group blog.