The University of Iowa’s 2016-2017 Mellon-Sawyer Seminar—Cultural and Textual Exchanges: The Manuscript Across Premodern Eurasia—commenced on Friday, September 9th. The seminar is an interdisciplinary collaboration dedicated to mapping cultural exchanges across Eurasia from roughly 400 CE ­to 1450 CE. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the year-long event focuses on the development, distribution, and sharing of manuscript technologies in the pre-print era, promising to rethink media and cultural change in a globalized context. It is co-hosted by Paul Dilley (Classics/Religious Studies), Katherine Tachau (History/UICB), and Timothy Barrett (UICB).

This seminar will bring some of the world’s best-known scholars in the history of the book—who have specialized, up-to-the-minute familiarity with the various manuscript cultures of pre-modern Eurasia—to the University of Iowa campus to share their expertise in public lectures as well as in seminar meetings.

More information about this seminar and a list of public lectures can be found at: http://eurasianmss.lib.uiowa.edu/