Dr Irina Shingiray will be participating in the Cambridge Postgraduate Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern Slavonic Studies, presented by Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, on February 12th at the University of Cambridge.
Led by Dr Oleksiy Tolochko, the workshop is entitled `The End of the Khazar “Yoke”‘and will explore the fundamental premise of medieval Slavonic Studies that the Kyivan polity emerged and initially developed in competition and in confrontation with the Khazar Khanate.
In a post on the Leiden Islam Blog, team member Marie Favereau considers that if we want to understand the dynamics of the Golden Horde, we need to disregard national borders. Read the full blog here.
Team member Dr Marie Favereau presented a talk entitled“The Golden Horde”.at the international conference Empires to be Remembered (organized by the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften) at Vienna on November 26.
She will also be giving a talk at the international conference The Mamluk Sultanate and its Neighbors: Economic, Social and Cultural Entanglement (organized by the Annemarie-Schimmel Research College “History and Society during the Mamluk Era, 1250-1517” of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Bonn) at Bonn on December 18. The title of the talk will be “The Mamluk sultanate and the Golden Horde: Tension and Interaction”.
On November 18th, the project team held a workshop with Dr. Zvezdana Dode, a Senior Researcher at the Rostov-on-Don branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who specializes on the reconstruction of costumes and textiles of the medieval populations of the Western Eurasian Steppe and the Caucasus Region. Her research shows that there is a major influence of nomadic equestrian cultures and practices on the development of the traditional adornment of the diverse communities in that region. Dr. Dode focused especially on the periods of the Turk-Khazar and Mongol imperial domination, when the so-called Silk Road exchange attained transcontinental proportions and manifested itself through archaeological remains found in graves. Through careful reconstruction and analysis of this evidence from archeological funerary contexts and its interpretation—and using anthropological, historical, semiotic, visual-arts, and ethnographic approaches— Dr. Dode was able to shed new light on the lives, bodies, material objects, and practices of the medieval nomads, and shared and discussed her newest finds, results, and projects with the team.
On November 4th 2015, the first workshop of the Nomadic Empires Project addressed economic and social institutions of mobile pastoralists through discussions with Dr. Daniel Murphy, a cultural anthropologist of the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Murphy’s work among herder groups of eastern and (more recently) western Mongolia was used as a platform for dialogues about the entangled spheres of pastoral labor, livestock management, and land use, as well as comparisons between revived pastoral institutions in modern Mongolia and historic practices documented among nomadic regimes in various parts of the world.
On Wednesday 14 October the project team was visited by Professor Gantogtokh Gonchig from the National University of Mongolia. He is an expert in Mongolian nomadic culture and rituals, dialects of ethnic groups of Mongolia and shaman worship terminologies. The team explored the meaning of key phrases used in the 13th century source ‘The Secret History of the Mongols’ from the ethnolinguistic and historical perspectives.
Team member Dr Bryan Miller will be giving a talk at the Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit (MIASU) at Cambridge University on October 27. The title of the talk will be “Configurations of Steppe Urbanism: Permanent Centers of Pastoral Polities in Mongolia.”
Pekka Hamalainen will be giving the Hugh Hawkins Lecture at Amherst College, Massachusetts, entitled”The Comanche Empire and the Grand Narrative of American History” on September 24th 2015. More information: https://www.amherst.edu/news/calendar/node/614590
Dr Maya Petrovich joined the Nomadic Empires team in July 2015. Dr Petrovich joins the project from