Professor Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh will speak at the Binghamton University Art Museum on Monday, September 9, 2019 at 4 pm. Her talk is entitled, “The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice,” and draws from her recent book about the Zey’tun Gospels. Art history, histories of genocide, cultural heritage, and the questions of the continuity of the medieval and the modern intersect in the biography of this medieval Armenian Gospels manuscript. Eight of its illuminated pages were discovered in the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2010, prompting a lawsuit. The tale of the separation of the pages from the manuscript tells a story of genocide and survival, and makes the case for a human right to art. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She researches the visual cultures of the Middle East, including issues of architectural preservation, museums, and cultural heritage.Hosted by the Middle East and North Africa Studies Program (MENA). Generously co-sponsored by the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP), the departments of Asian and Asian American Studies, Art History, and Classical and Near Eastern Studies, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Material and Visual Worlds TAE, and the Binghamton University Art Museum.
