The Northwestern Medieval Colloquium and the Department of Art History are pleased to invite you to a talk by Professor Antony Eastmond of the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Antony Eastmond (The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London): "Byzantium, the Caucasus, and Artistic Borders in the Medieval World"
Thursday, April 16, 2026, 5 p.m., University Hall 201 (Hagstrum Room)
This lecture will consider some of the issues raised by trying to write a ‘national’ history of art in the twenty-first century. I will address the questions I am facing as I try to write a history of the arts of Georgia in the Caucasus. How do we define the borders and benefits of a ‘national’ art, particularly as art history takes an increasingly global and transnational turn? What value is there is defining an art by geography, language, religion and/or ethnicity? And how can we deal with the vague and porous borders that demarcate political, cultural and religious space in the middle ages? I will evaluate the risks of my approach, and try to defend my belief that it is possible to write a national art history without nationalism.
Antony Eastmond is AG Leventis Professor of Byzantine Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He is currently a Fellow in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. He has worked extensively on the arts of Byzantium and the Caucasus, and on the fuzzy frontier between the Christian and Islamic worlds. Ironically, his last book, Tamta’s World (2017), argued against the delimiting of art history by borders of language, ethnicity, religion, or geography.
Caitlin Kelley Burney
(847) 491-3230
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