Arts and Events Calendar

This half-day symposium considers the ways in which the sacred realm — worlds beyond everyday experience and earthly perception — are made materially manifest to the senses. How do material objects and spaces communicate and create knowledge about the divine? Recent trends in ritual studies and reception theory has underscored the power of both religious performance and images as agents of social, cultural, and political identity and change. Building on and expanding from such work, this symposium moves beyond the strictly visual study of sacred images to investigate how the sacred is constructed as perceivable to a wide range of bodily senses and understood through the material world of things. Reception to follow.

Introduction: Ann Marie Yasin (USC, Classics and Art History)

Speakers:

Glenn Peers (UT Austin, Art History), “Transformative Touches among Things in Byzantium”
Lisa Bitel (USC, History, Gender Studies and Religion), “Bruised by the Saints”
James McHugh (USC, Religion), “Seeing Scents: Multisensory Adornment in Indian Religions”
Milette Gaifman (Yale University, History of Art), “Strategies for the Creation of the Sacred in Greek Antiquity”

Speaker Bios:

Glenn Peers (University of Texas at Austin, Art History). Byzantine Art. Has published on the theoretical aspects of Byzantine art, as well as on theological and hagiographical problems. Books include, Subtle Bodies: Representing Angels in Byzantium (Univ. of California Pr. 2001) and Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (Penn State University Pr. 2004). Currently working on twelfth-/thirteenth-century Eastern Christian art, Christian spolia in early Islamic contexts, and an exhibition on Byzantine materiality.

Lisa Bitel (USC, History, Gender Studies and Religion). Studies the social, cultural, and religious history of medieval Europe. She has written four books about religion and/or gender in early medieval Europe, and published articles about sex, dreams, architecture, and Christianity, among other topics. She is currently researching two books about religious vision: a book on the material history of medieval visions and a collaborative book about a modern-day vision event in the Mojave desert.

James McHugh (USC, Religion). Medieval South Asia. Research interests include the role of smell in religions, as well as the material culture of South Asian religions more broadly. At USC he teaches courses on South Asian religions and on the material culture of religion. His dissertation was entitled “Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in South Asian Culture and Religion.”

Milette Gaifman (Yale, Art History). Greek art. Currently working on the divine image in Greek religion from the naturalistic to the non-figural. Recent and forthcoming publications include: “Statue, Cult and Reproduction,” Art History,(April 2006), 258-279; “The Aniconic Image of the Roman Near East,” in: The Variety of Local Religions of the Ancient Near East, Ted Kaizer ed., in the series Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Brill 2008), 37-72; “Framing Divine Bodies in Greek Art,” in: Framing the Visual in Greek and Roman Art, Michael Squire and Verity Platt eds., (Cambridge University Press forthcoming).