Yesterday, I participated in a very interesting workshop organized by the Research Group on African and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Bergen, in the frame of a project that began with funds from the French-Norwegian mobility grant Aurora (for a collaboration between our group and the Institut des mondes africaines in Paris I), and continues on the basis of various funding channels aiming first at a publication and then eventually at the formation of a larger research project.
For the first time, the focus of our project centered around the notion of materiality of texts and archives in Africa, and I felt that I was in the best company to test ideas that I will investigate further in our group’s next meeting in Paris in December, as well as in the next Chaos Symposium (organized by a long-standing cooperation of Scandinavian researchers of Studies of Religion) that will be dedicated to the topic of Religion and Materiality and will take place in Bergen in April 2016.
The coming year seems to be full of interesting academic venues of Nubiological interest. Let us present four hereby:
- In July 2016, Adam Simmons, a PhD candidate at the University of Lancaster, is attempting to introduce the world of Medieval Nubia to the renowned annual Medieval Congress of Leeds. You have exactly two weeks to prepare and send your abstract to Adam who appeared newly in Nubian Studies but has marked himself in important contributions at Ruffini’s wiki-page medievalnubia.info. You can see the circular below:
- In a year from now, the 12th Meroitic Conference will take place in Prague (Czech Republic), a new center for Sudanological activities both on the Meroitic civilization and on earlier cultures. Here is the first circular:
- Already this September though, the first ever colloquium on the Archaeology of the Bayuda Desert will take place in Münster, where Angelika Lohwasser is based. She is directing the Wadi Abu Dom Itinerary project. I was recently invited to prepare for publication the very interesting set of graffiti that they have registered during their survey of the fascinating landscape of the Bayuda!
You can see the full program of the conference here:
- Finally, on the 26th of October, we will be celebrating the 80th birthday of professor emeritus at the University of Bergen Richard Holton Pierce, who is known among Nubiologists primarily for being one of the four editors of the Fontes Historiae Nubiorum. More details on the conference – that I am helping my colleagues Eivind Seland and Pål Steiner to organize – in a coming post. Stay tuned…
In the meantime, we renew our invitation for Henriette’s trial lecture and defense, next Thrusday and Friday respectively! For details see here, and here for the trial lecture and here for the defense.
Medieval Sai Project 