Gender & Sexuality in the Afterlives of Byzantium: An Online Roundtable with Roland Betancourt, Allison Leigh, and Roman Utkin


 Art History     Dec 4 2020 | 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM Zoom

Join Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies for a talk with Roland Betancourt, professor of art history. 

Register here.

Schedule and Registration: This online event will take place at 4pm ET on Friday, December 4, 2020. Register here to reserve your access to the event. Registration is free and open to the public.

Event Description: In his recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality (Princeton University Press), Roland Betancourt looks at the history of sexual consent, reproductive rights, trans lives, same-gender desire, and race in the medieval world. Focusing on the Byzantine Empire, his research stands at the crossroads not only of many modern Christian traditions, including Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, but also of the cultural and artistic heritage of European and Slavic worlds.

In this roundtable, Betancourt is joined by Allison Leigh and Roman Utkin to discuss the long, rich, and complex histories of gender and sexuality in the afterlives of Byzantium, focusing on the key role that the Empire has played in the Slavic worlds. This discussion will apply the implications and conclusions of Betancourt’s research to complicate and enrich an understanding of the Slavic tradition.

This event is hosted by Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies, and co-sponsored by the Art History Department at the University of California, Irvine.

Roland Betancourt is Professor of Art History and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), and Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Allison Leigh is Assistant Professor of Art History and the SLEMCO/LEQSF Regents Endowed Professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She is a specialist in European and Russian art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and her first book, Picturing Russia’s Men: Masculinity and Modernity in 19th-Century Painting, is currently available from Bloomsbury Visual Arts. Her primary research interests include the development of new art historical methodologies, masculinity studies, the history and historiography of modernism, and the philosophy of art and aesthetics in the modern era.

Roman Utkin is Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. He studies twentieth-century and contemporary Russian literature and visual culture with a special interest in queer histories and poetics. His current book project examines the unique interwar diasporic community known as Russian Berlin. He recently edited a special issue of The Russian Review, "Illegal Queerness: Russian Culture and Society in the Age of the 'Gay Propaganda' Law" (forthcoming January 2021).

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