Featured Speaker: Dr. Alison M. Vacca, Columbia University
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM (Eastern)
Can we bring together Persian poetry, Georgian romance, Shi'i ḥadīth collections, Greek patriography, Arabic conquest narrative, Hebrew correspondence, Syriac history, and Armenian hagiography to the same page? What happens if we embrace the complexities of medieval sources and reject any single organizational schema such as academic field, (discipline?) language, chronology, religion, or genre? This talk presents an acentric and collagic model for thinking about medieval history, shorn of ingrained modern hierarchies that we typically use to organize the past. It presents descriptions of medieval marriage to demonstrate the methodological opportunities of challenging linear organizational models. In particular, it reveals what this type of history can offer to the field of Armenian studies, moving past the liminality implied in the “between Byzantium and Islam” or “between Rome and Iran” paradigms.
Alison M. Vacca holds the Gevork M. Avedissian Chair in Armenian History and Civilization at Columbia University, where she teaches courses related to early Islamic and medieval Armenian history. Her work relies on Arabic and Armenian sources to explore Armenia and Caucasian Albania under the rule of the Umayyad (r. 661-750) and ʿAbbasid (r. 750-1258) Caliphates. She recently published An Armenian Futūḥ Narrative, co-authored with Sergio La Porta, which received the Best Edition and Translation book award from the Mediterranean Studies Seminar.
Organized by the Center for Armenian Studies, University of Michigan.
Co-sponsored by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR) and the department of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Michigan.