CSMC Newsletter

Only a couple of weeks to go until our major conference ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’, from 27-29 September! Structured in three parallel sessions, this conference will provide a unique forum for sharing experiences and views among the international community working on written artefacts, showcasing pioneering research, and developing new ideas. The programme of the event is available on the conference’s website, so do have a look at schedule and sign up either for the whole conference or for individual days.

This September, our Artist in Residence Axel Malik turns the SUB Hamburg into ‘The Feverish Library’, leaving marks of his ‘scriptal method’ both on the exterior façade and in the reading rooms of the library. The vernissage will take place in the form of a guided tour of the installation with the artist on 12 September, starting at 6:00 pm at the main entrance of the SUB. Participation is free of charge, you can register via email at pr@sub.uni-hamburg.de. ‘The Feverish Library’ will be on display until October 31. In an interview on our website, Malik talks about the impact of art in public spaces and why libraries are the ideal environment for his art works.

Doing research on written artefacts implies bearing responsibility for the ethical treatment of the artefacts themselves, the people of the communities to which they belong, and the data obtained from studying them. This winter semester, the short lecture series ‘Handle with Care: Cultural Heritage and Ethics in Manuscript Studies’ is back and will address the complex demands facing researchers at their work. The seven sessions will provide both theoretical reflections and practical advice of practitioners, which has been developed by the Cluster’s Ethics Working Group.

Which creators and users of written artefacts and which types of artefacts have we deemed (un-)worthy of our attention? Whose perspectives on written artefacts have we incorporated into our research and whose not? And what spoken and unspoken cultural and disciplinary norms have led to such marginalisations? The bilingual lecture series ‘Understanding Written Artefacts: Untold Stories’ / ‘Schriftartefakte verstehen: Unerzählte Geschichten’ tells some yet untold stories about writing and written artefacts. It is the second lecture series within UWA's Equal Opportunity & Diversity initiative. All lectures will be held, in hybrid format, on Mondays, 6:15 pm to 8:00 pm CET.

Just one more month to visit at our exhibition ‘Written Treasures of Hamburg: New Questions to Old Manuscripts’, which is on display at SUB Hamburg until 2 October! If you want to get a taste of the exhibition before you go – or cannot make it to Hamburg while it’s on – you can have a look at a recent contribution in the TV show ‘Hamburg Journal’ at NDR, which reported on the ‘Written Treasures’ in August.

Twice a year, a bunch of new English translations of articles from Cécile Michel’s French blog ‘Mesopotamian Bulletins’ is published on our website. Four new articles have just been made available. Among other things, they deal with the damage caused to archaeological sites by the devastating earthquake Turkey in February, and how the famous writer Agatha Christie found inspiration for her novels on trips to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s.

The manuscripts of Timbuktu are irreplaceable documents of the cultural history of West Africa. Since 2014, the CSMC has been working on site to preserve them. While the security situation in the country worsens, the final courses of the ‘Timbuktu Manuscript Training Project’ took place this summer. In our blog, you can read how our field manager Maria Luisa Russo has been dealing with the difficult circumstances on site, and have a look at new photo galleries with images by the photographer Nicolas Réméné.