Schedule, Speakers, and Abstracts
Schedule
12:00–12:15 Welcome (Eben Graves) and Introduction (Mark Roosien)
12:15–12:55 Mark Roosien, “Earthquake Rituals in Constantinople: Disaster and Identity Formation”
12:55–1:35 Remi Chiu, “Madrigals on the 1576 Plague of Milan”
1:35–1:50 Discussion and Q&A (moderated by Vera Shevzov)
1:50–2:10 Break
2:10–2:50 Vera Shevzov, Title Forthcoming
2:50–3:40 Lidia Chakovskaya, “The Eternal Glory of Nature and the Art of the Gulag”
3:40–4:20 Sarah Fredericks, “Rituals of Apology and Confession: Responses to Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters”
4:20–4:40 Discussion and Q&A (moderated by Mark Roosien)
4:40–5:00 Closing Remarks
Abstracts & Speaker Bios
Lidia Chakovskaya
The Eternal Glory of Nature and the Art of the Gulag
The representation of Nature played a surprisingly large role in the art of Gulag artists. The artists, surviving in the concentration camps of the Gulag, when they were able to paint, widely drew on images from nature. The corpus of Gulag art is yet to be published, so several professional artists will be chosen for the presentation. They either painted while in camp or later in their artistic career. In this presentation we will discuss the challenge of referring to nature for the artist in inhuman conditions. We will see how nature became seen in the art of some artists as the image of God, while in the art of others it reflected the deterioration of men. The first strategy uses nature to distance oneself from the cruelty of the world and to draw closer to God himself and his creation. The sacredness of creation is something helping to survive and is the only sacred thing left in the world, which has lost its human face. This can be seen in the art of Alexey Arzibushev. The second strategy presents Nature as a silent witness to the cruelty of mankind. It is not involved in it and is distant from mankind. The artist Ludwig Simonov painted Nature as a sort of a veil over the everyday cruelty of the Gulag.
Dr. Lidia Chakovskaya is a senior researcher at the State Institute of Art Studies (SIAS) and lecturer at Moscow State Lomonosov University. She is a specialist in Jewish and Christian iconography of Late Antiquity and history of Jewish Art, and author of the 2011 book “Memory of the Temple incarnate: Jewish pictorial Art of the Byzantine period.” In 2017-2020 she has participated in a project devoted to sacred music in Abrahamic traditions. Since 1990s she has been involved together with her husband, historian of the Soviet period Alexey Beglov, in collecting interviews and material remains of the everyday life of religious communities of the Soviet epoch. She has also participated in the exhibition projects devoted to presenting the material remains as a tool of formation the historical memory in the younger generation. In 2017 she took part in the “God after Gulag” conference at Smith College with the presentation «The Exhibition at the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery and the Formation of the Historical Memory.” In 2019 she presented a public lecture in Smith College “Art of the Khrushev Thaw and the New Discovery of Icon.”
Remi Chiu
Madrigals on the 1576 Plague of Milan
The subject of this talk is a series of four madrigals—two sacred, one Petrarchan, and one laudatory setting—by Paolo Caracciolo, published in his 1582 Primo libro de madrigali, that were related to a recent outbreak of plague in Milan that claimed roughly twenty percent of the city’s population. A consideration of these works against the backdrop of the Milanese disaster specifically, and of early-modern understanding of plague in general, reveals a multitude of sacred and secular cultural practices that were encoded therein, from the worship of saints, to Galenic and Neo-Platonic medicine, to civic and artistic patronage. Taken together, these madrigals not only look backward to commemorate a past outbreak, but also present a comprehensive set of anti-pestilential strategies to prevent future disasters.
Dr. Remi Chiu is Associate Professor in the Music Faculty in Loyola University Maryland’s Department of Fine Arts. He is a musicologist specializing in Renaissance music and the history of medicine. He is the author of Plague and Music in the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which examines the role of music and music-making in the medical, spiritual, and civic strategies for combating pestilence. In addition to publications on music and the plague, he has also written about musical settings of the Song of Songs, Renaissance contagion theories, and the conjoined singing twins Millie-Christine McCoy. Prof. Chiu earned his PhD at McGill University and was a winner of the Paul A. Pisk Prize awarded by the American Musicological Society.
Sarah E. Fredericks
Rituals of Apology and Confession: Responses to Anthropogenic Environmental Disasters
In recent years as evidence of anthropogenic environmental degradation, including climate change, has become more apparent, new rituals have emerged to help people cope with their participation in such devastation. For instance, bloggers and discussion board participants have implicitly developed confessional rituals about their environmental guilt and shame. Some veterans participated in ritual of confession and apology to the Standing Rock Sioux for the actions of the United States, particularly the Army, against Native Americans and the land. By examining these rituals, ritual theory, and social psychological research on guilt and shame, I will explore how rituals help people cope with their individual and collective guilt and shame as they recognize that many contemporary natural disasters have significant anthropogenic causes. I will argue that dealing with these emotional and existential dimensions of environmental degradation is a necessary, but too often overlooked, dimension of mitigation and adaptation of climate change in particular.
Dr. Sarah Fredericks is Director of Doctoral Studies and Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Professor Fredericks’ research focuses on sustainability, sustainable energy, environmental guilt and shame, and environmental justice; her work draws upon pragmatic and comparative religious ethics. She is the author of Measuring and Evaluating Sustainability: Ethics in Sustainability Indexes (Routledge, 2013), and articles in Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture; International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology; Environmental Justice, and Ethics, Policy, and Environment. Fredericks co-edits a book series, Religious Ethics and Environmental Challenges (Lexington Press), with Kevin O’Brien. Fredericks, along with colleagues from three other universities, was recently awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Humanities Without Walls, a consortium that funds cross-institutional teams researching topics in the humanities. Prof. Fredericks’ project, “Being Human in the Age of Humans: Perspectives from Religion and Ethics,” seeks to better understand the impact of climate change from a humanities perspective. Professor Fredericks is currently working on a book about the ethical dimensions of experiencing and inducing environmental guilt and shame, particularly about climate change.
Mark Roosien
Earthquake Rituals in Constantinople: Disaster and Identity Formation
According to trauma theorists, natural disasters often threaten the stability of group identities. Rituals in response to disaster can be ways of forming a new sense of identity and belonging at a time in which a community’s self-understanding is in flux. Rituals in response to earthquakes in late antique Constantinople can be viewed as catalysts for the formation of identity in the aftermath of environmental upheaval. From its founding in the early 4th century into the early Middle Ages, the city struggled to harmonize its imagined Roman and Christian pasts and ideologies. Rituals and liturgical rites in response to the frequent earthquakes that struck the city brought this tension to the surface and provided a means for reconciling conflicts between the two. I argue that the history of earthquake rituals from the 4th through the 8th century played a role in the formation of a hybrid, Christian-Roman identity for Constantinople, drawing on Old Testament narratives that both complemented and challenged traditional Roman ideologies and values.
Dr. Mark Roosien is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Yale Institute of Sacred Music for 2019-2020. He researches the role of environmental instability and natural disaster upon Christian practice and belief, with special interest in the connections between liturgy, theology, and ecology in the late antique and medieval Eastern Mediterranean. His current book project, “The Discipline of the Land: Earthquakes, Liturgy, and the Environment in Constantinople,” examines how the seismicity of the Eastern Mediterranean affected ritual, theology and identity in the East Roman capital from the fourth through the tenth century. He received his PhD in Theology from the University of Notre Dame in January 2019, and taught there as a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow for the 2019 Spring Semester. He has published in the journals Studia Liturgica, Worship, Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies, Studia Patristica and several edited volumes.
Vera Shevzov
Paper title and abstract forthcoming
Dr. Vera Shevzov is Professor of Religion, Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Smith College. Supported at various stages by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon Foundation, her research engages a broad array of issues related to religion and people’s sense of belonging. She is interested in questions related to religion and collective identities (including ethnic and national), historical and sacred memory, and religion and secularism. Her work focuses in large part on lived religion, as well as on religion’s interface with visual culture (especially iconography), politics and revolution.