Thursday, April 14, 2022 at 8:00pm EDT / 5:00pm PDT
On Zoom and NAASR's YouTube channel Armenian Studies.

PRESENTER
DR. MICHAEL PIFER, Lecturer in Armenian Languages & Literature, University of Michigan

By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolia had become a place of stunning cultural diversity. Michael Pifer’s Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (Yale University Press, 2021) is the first book to study the era’s major Persian, Armenian, and Turkish poets, from roughly 1250 to 1340, against the canvas of this broader literary ecosystem.

Kindred Voices explores how the region’s Muslim and Christian poets grappled with the multilingual and multi-religious worlds they inhabited, attempting to impart resonant forms of instruction to their intermingled communities. This convergence produced fresh poetic styles and sensibilities, native to no single people or language, that enabled the period’s literature to reach new and wider audiences.

Michael Pifer is lecturer in Armenian language and literature at the University of Michigan. He is a specialist in Armenian cultural production with an emphasis on the development of vernacular Armenian literature during the medieval period. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2014. His publications include the coedited volume An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion.

CO-SPONSORS
National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)
Society for Armenian Studies (SAS)

Purchase Kindred Voices from the NAASR Bookstore.