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

December 4 @ 3:00 PM CT via Zoom

Registration required. Register here.

Event Description: In his recent book, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press), Roland Betancourt (Professor of Art History, University of California, Irvine) 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 (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and Roman Utkin (Assistant Professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Wesleyan University) 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. More info + link to free registration is here.

This event is co-sponsored by the Art History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and hosted by Borderlines Open School for Advanced Cross-Cultural Studies, a new nonprofit organization that aims to offer the general public, students, teachers, and professors alike affordable opportunities for engaging with and developing advanced and creative scholarship outside of the usual university system, as well as to ethically pay and support all of their instructors, recognizing their intellectual and pedagogical labor as valuable work that matters. To learn more about this new initiative, please see our FAQs. You may also email me with any questions.