EAST OF BYZANTIUM LECTURE

Reyhan Durmaz
University of Pennsylvania

The medieval Middle Eastern countryside was a dynamic space populated by groups uniting around powerful patrons, distinct religious practices, and a variety of languages. These groups, contrary to our expectations of a “community”, were often destabilized, negotiated, dismantled, and reconfigured. As a way to capture this dynamism, in light of literature and epigraphy, this talk explores a group of demographic categories that are often sidelined in our conventional taxonomies of the medieval Middle Eastern society – such as rulers and subjects, clergy and lay people, elite and non-elite.

Reyhan Durmaz is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the history of religion, especially Christianity, in the late antique and medieval Middle East. Her first book, Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond (2022), examines the transmissions of saints’ stories between Christianity and Islam. Her research has been published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Harvard Theological Review, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, among other venues. She is currently working on a book that explores the forms and expressions of Christianity in the medieval Middle Eastern countryside.

This lecture will take place live on ZOOM, followed by a question and answer period.

POSTER | TIME ZONE CONVERTER

The view from a hermit’s cave in Tur Abdin, looking at the village of Salah and the Monastery of Mor Ya’qub. Photo: Reyhan Durmaz