Africa and Byzantium, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Studies Symposium, Washington, DC, April 25–26, 2025
A major exhibition on “Africa and Byzantium,” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (November 13, 2023–March 3, 2024) and the Cleveland Museum of Art (April14, 2023–July 21, 2024), generated excitement in scholars in the fields of late antiquity, Byzantium, and the global Middle Ages, as well as the general public. Merging art, religion, literature, history, and archaeology, the exhibition illuminated the development, continuity, and adaptation of Byzantine art and culture in North Africa and the Horn of Africa.
The tradition inherited from great twentieth-century scholars of Byzantium has just begun to acknowledge the vitality and major contributions made by people living in Africa to the Byzantine world. Isolated studies have focused on late Roman North Africa, Christian Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia. Still, no exhibition or scholarly publication had attempted to put these cultures together within a broader global framework and in major public venues. While the substantial exhibition catalog brought the study of these little-considered areas forward significantly, the richness of the traditions of Byzantine and Byzantine-sphere art and culture in Africa is such that the exhibition and its catalog are still only a beginning. This Spring Symposium builds on the research developed for the exhibition and explores issues such as identity, authority, ethnicity, race, belonging, and memory among medieval Christian communities in Africa. Overall, it will showcase a burgeoning new field of scholarship on medieval Africa and the expansion of Byzantine studies.
Symposiarchs:
Elizabeth S. Bolman (Case Western Reserve University)
Andrea Myers Achi (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Advance registration required.