About this Event
The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present Dr. April Fein, Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Join us on Friday, Novemebr 13th at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, on online (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85219499088), for her talk "Building an Emir: George of Antioch and an Architecture of Authority in Norman Sicily".
This talk will be moderated by Dr. Evan Freeman, Assistant Professor, Department of Global History and Hellenic Canadian Congress of BC Chair in Hellenic Studies.
Attendance is free and open to the public.
This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation(SNF).
ABSTRACT
In 2015 UNESCO inscribed nine twelfth-century monuments of Norman Sicily on the World Heritage List as an outstanding example of "socio-cultural syncretism between Western, Islamic, and Byzantine cultures." Scholarship has long credited that achievement to the Norman kings. One of the nine, Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio (the Martorana) in Palermo, complicates that account. Its founder was King Roger II's chief minister, George of Antioch, an Arabic-speaking Christian displaced from Antioch to North Africa and then to Sicily. Read alongside George's Arabic biographies, court documents, and seals, the church's inscriptions and mosaics show a minister constructing his own authority alongside the king's, in a visual language drawn from the court and from the worlds George had crossed rather than handed down from the throne.
BIOGRAPHY
Ariel Fein is an art historian of the medieval Mediterranean and Africa whose work focuses on intercultural and interreligious relationships in the visual cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world. Her first book, Refugee to Kingmaker: George of Antioch and the Making of Norman Sicily, is forthcoming from Penn State University Press. Her scholarship has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Muqarnas, and publications of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with articles in press at Gesta and Dumbarton Oaks. She completed her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University and has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a Visiting Scholar and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Smarthistory. She is currently an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Event venue & nearby stays
Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive West, Burnaby, Canada
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