Prof. Mia Fuller, Department of Italian Studies, was invited to give a talk titled “Valorizing Colonial Capital(s): Asmara and Its Italian Modernist Architecture,” for the Urban Studies Research Cluster at UC Davis Humanities Institute in February. In April, she gave the talk titled “Libya: History, Scholarship, and Current Events,” as part of the Middle East Teach-In Series organized by the Middle East Studies Council and Arab Students Association at Yale University. She also presented the keynote address, “Why Italian Colonialism Matters,” at the 6th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies in Melbourne, Australia. Fuller published an article titled "Libyan Genocide 2.0: Today’s Conflict in Light of the Colonial Past,” in the Fair Observer in September.
Prof. Maria Mavroudi, Department of History, gave a plenary address titled "Byzantium Viewed by the Others" at the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria in September. She discussed Byzantium's classical tradition, its reception (through contact with Byzantium) by the medieval Latin and Arabic literary cultures, and the way this reception has been fashioned into a history of Western thought in the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. She also participated at a round table on magic at the same congress, where she presented a paper on an icon of Christ used by the eleventh-century empress Zoe for divination and political decision-making. This fall semester, Mavroudi is on sabbatical leave while finishing her book Bilingualism in Greek and Arabic: Evidence from the Manuscripts.
