CSMC Newsletter

In many cultures, humans have been connecting social, political, or religious privileges to imagined or real bloodlines. Starting on 1 August, a compound of four research projects at CSMC and Universität Bonn embark upon a comparative investigation of genealogies. They will analyse how lineages were presented, documented, and instrumentalised in early modern Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. ‘World genealogy’ features individual projects by Steffen Döll, Markus Friedrich, and Berend ter Haar, as well as Evrim Binbaş at Bonn.

There is a wealth of research on the history of libraries, but comparative studies on different traditions and periods are rare. Libraries in the Manuscript Age, the new volume of Studies in Manuscript Cultures, contributes to filling this gap. The juxtaposition of case studies brings out contrasts but also suggestive similarities. The volume was edited by Nuria de Castilla, François Déroche, and Michael Friedrich, and is available as open access from the publisher’s website.

The course conveys central topics in the field of general manuscript research combined with specific skills, promoting the independent, critical, and analytical work with manuscripts, and is open to students with a wide range of backgrounds. They will learn how to conduct cultural and scientific examinations of the texts, images, notes, and diagrams contained in the manuscripts, including scientific material analyses. The current application period for the 2023 cohort ends on 31 March.

From the late 19th century, private scholars took on vital role in the preservation and transfer of manuscripts and manuscript collections from the Middle East, West Asia, and North Africa to Europe and America. The spring series of the Gotha Manuscript Talks explores their backgrounds and motives. The series is organised by the Gotha Research Library in cooperation with Konrad Hirschler at CSMC. Starting on 8 March, all lectures will be held on Wednesday evenings at 6:15 pm.

The TAG conference brings together researchers and graffiti artists who look at the phenomenon of ‘tagging’ – writing one’s own name or a pseudonym in public space. From 30 June to 1 July 2023, the next edition of the conference will take place in Hamburg as part of the programme accompanying the exhibition ‘EINE STADT WIRD BUNT’ (‘A City Becomes Colourful’) at Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (until 31 July). As a partner of the exhibition, CSMC is co-hosting the conference. The Call for Papers has recently been published, contributions can be submitted until 1 April.

From 21-26 August 2023, the 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2023) will take place in San José, California. The prestigious conference also includes the 2nd Workshop on Computational Paleography, which is co-organised by Hussein Mohammed. The aim of the workshop is to bridge the gap between the different research fields analysing handwritten scripts in ancient artefacts, and is mainly targeting computer scientists, natural scientists, and researchers in the humanities who are working on ancient writing systems and their material dimension. The Call for Papers closes on 1 May.

The most recent edition of the NDR programme 'Rund um den Michel' was all about research in Hamburg. The show included a feature with our PhD student Sanja Ewald and our former Artist in Residence Mirko Reisser alias DAIM, who talked about the special history of graffiti culture in Hamburg. The section on graffiti begins at minute 23:45 in the video, which is available in the NDR media library.

From 20-24 February, we had our annual winter school on 'Cuneiform Culture and the Akkadian Language' - and for the first time in three years, students could attend this course in-person again. We would like to thank everyone who participated, and especially our lecturer, Cécile Michel, for once again offering this wonderful course. We will have more news to share about our upcoming summer school in July very soon. 

At first glance, it is an unassuming quadrangular box, made of fired clay in the highlands of what is now Guatemala in the late first millennium CE. On closer inspection, however, our Artefact of the Month opens up an outsized window to the history of Maya hieroglyphs, technologies of writing, and the linguistic and cultural diversity of the ancient Maya lowlands.

In ‘5 Questions to…’, members of CSMC chat about their background, what motivates them, and their favourite written artefacts. In the case of Martin Jörg Schäfer, the latter was part of no less than the most prominent theatre scandal in the German-speaking world.