Antiquarianism in the Islamic WorldSymposium at the Bard Graduate Center, New York

7 May 2019

On May 9-10, 2019 the Bard Graduate Center hosts a symposium on Antiquarianism in the Islamic World sponsored by the Trehan Research Fund for Islamic Art and Material Culture.

“Antiquarianism” is the term of art used to describe the investigation of the European past through its material remains before art history and archaeology emerged in the nineteenth century as the disciplines devoted to its study. In the period between 1300 and 1800 the encounter with ruins in Northern Europe, North Africa, Greece, and the Levant led to the development of new notions of evidence, new technologies of historical argumentation, new forms of literary exposition, and new standards of proof. While history from texts remained powerful, for a few centuries its hegemony was challenged.

The history of antiquarianism in Europe has been the subject of a burst of new work in the past decades. This coincides with the importance attached more generally to “materiality” and the study of material culture. But there has also been a completely new effort to explore this phenomenon, in its own terms, in other cultures. Comparative projects were the focus of conferences at Bard Graduate Center in 2004, the Getty Research Institute in 2010, and the Joukowsky Institute at Brown in 2015, and each of these has resulted in a book of essays: Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China 1500-1800 (2012), World Antiquarianism (2013), and Antiquarianisms: Contact, Conflict, Comparison (2017).

The time has come to examine the Islamic world in these same terms and with this same care. That is the goal of this conference.

The symposium's participants are:
Peter N. Miller (Bard Graduate Center)
Abigail Krasner Balbale (New York University)
Stephanie Mulder (University of Texas at Austin)
Alain Schnapp (University of Paris, Pantheon-Sorbonne)
Sarah Bowen Savant (Aga Khan University, London)
Stefan Heidemann (Hamburg University
Antoine Borrut (University of Maryland, College Park)
Daniel Mahoney (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna)
Konrad Hirschler (Free University of Berlin)
Marina Rustow (Princeton University)
Frédéric Bauden (University of Liège)
Elias Muhanna (Brown University)
Islam Dayeh (Free University of Berlin)
Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul; Collège de France, Paris)
Ahmed El Shamsy (Univesity of Chicago)

For further details and a livestream of the symposium, please visit the event's website.