Convivencia Lecture Series

AY 2021-22

Duke Islamic Studies Center/Jewish Studies/Duke Middle East Studies Center/Asian and Middle East Studies/Romance Studies

The “Convivencia” lecture series over the course in Fall 2021 explored the interaction between Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities in the Iberian peninsula and across the diaspora. The lecture series featured the most prominent scholars working on the topic—but doing so through an interdisciplinary perspective that explored the intersection, overlap, and mutual influence between the various faith communities, in architecture, music, literature, philosophy, mysticism, theology, and linguistics.

The lecture series was jointly hosted by a number of different units on campus, including the “Geopolitics and Culture” FOCUS cluster, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, Romance Studies, Jewish Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies, and the Religions and Public Life initiative at Kenan Institute for Ethics.

The lecture series included:

• Ellen Haskell, the Herman and Zelda Bernard Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC-Greensboro, who talked about the Jewish mystical text the Zohar and its “conversations with Christianity,” drawing on her book Mystical Resistance.

• Michele Lamprakos, Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, who discussed the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba and its various historical and architectural layers as emblematic of the tensions, conflicts, and mutual appreciation between the Muslim and Christian community.

• Bruno Estigarribia, professor of Spanish Linguistics in Romance Studies at UNC presented on the development of Castilian and the Spanish language, in relation to other languages like Judeo-Spanish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic.

• Marina Rustow, the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University talked about her new book The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue (Princeton, 2020).

• Sarah Abrevaya Stein, the Viterbi Family Endowed Chain in Mediterranean Jewish Studies and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA, talked about her award winning book Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019) that traces the dispersion of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki throughout the world.