Ittai Weinryb, Ph.D.

Arbeitsvorhaben

Art and Frontier: The Black Sea and the Making of European Globalism

A frontier is an imaginary boundary that divides space in two: what belongs to you and what does not. It is the edge of your own human cognition; it creates a theoretical (and sometimes physical) line between the known and the unknown, designating a geographic realm where the rules of conduct and cultural practice differ from the center. Ultimately, a frontier offers ways to question conceptualizations of self and identity through geographic proclamations of alterity – mapping personal, social, and political perspectives onto the visible world. In this project, I center on the European frontier of the Black Sea during the Middle Ages by focusing on art and material culture produced and consumed by missionaries and merchants in Crimea during the fourteenth century. I argue that a close look into how art and material culture worked to produce, define, and profess the actual and conceptual space of the frontier can give rise to a new understanding of the art, habits, and practices of the European centers.

Recommended Reading

Weinryb, Ittai. “Hildesheim Avant-Garde: Bronze, Columns, and Colonialism.” Speculum 93, no. 3 (July 2018): 728–782. https://doi.org/10.1086/698705.
–. The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
–, ed. Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press / New York: Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 2018.

Publikationen aus der Fellowbibliothek

Weinryb, Ittai (Chicago, Ill., 2018)

Hildesheim avant-garde : bronze, columns, and colonialism

Weinryb, Ittai (New York, NY, 2018)

Agents of faith : votive objects in time and place