Erin Piñon (PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University): The Shah, the Synaxarion, and the Seventeenth Century: Silenced Sources, Textual Transmission, and ‘Aesthetic Decline’ in Early Modern Armenian Books.

Thursday 1 June 2023, 5pm

Harold Lee Room, Pembroke College

All welcome. 

With the rescue mission of silenced genres underway, Piñon discusses how and where Armenian histories were imagined, recorded, and remembered in the early modern period in both manuscript and print. Where can we see Armenian histories, and what do we gain from visualizing the past from a neglected, Armenian perspective? What is lost as historical texts are translated from one medium to another? How have modern aesthetic criticisms become barriers to locating images of Armenian history?  

Erin M. Piñon is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She specializes in early modern Armenian book arts and material culture. Her work is informed by her studies in medieval and early modern literature, liturgy, and theology. She has published essays on Armenian art and ritual in the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies, West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, and for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Dallas Museum of Art.  

 This seminar is part of the Silence and Visuality Seminars on Armenian Art & History – an interdisciplinary series presenting current research by emerging and established scholars, and conversations with distinguished contemporary artists. Seminar Conveners are Dr Suzan Meryem Rosita Kalaycı, Director of the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research, and Dr Vazken Khatchig Davidian, Associate Member of Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. This series of talks is hosted by the Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research and supported by TORCH funding.