Annual Workshop Lecture Series

Each year CEMERS organizes an interdisciplinary “workshop” lecture series in which scholars from other institutions, along with our own faculty and doctoral students, present work-in-progress as well as polished material ready for publication.  This series is central in the Center’s mission to promote new scholarship and to foster an exchange across disciplinary boundaries.

CEMERS Workshop Lecture Series/Calendar of Events (Click for Calendars):

• Spring 2012
• Fall 2011
• Spring 2011
• Fall 2010
• Spring 2010
• Fall 2009
• Spring 2009
• Fall 2008
• Spring 2008
• Fall 2007

The Bernardo Lecture

Inaugurated in 1990 through the generosity of Aldo and Reta Bernardo, the Bernardo Lecture Series brings to campus distinguished scholars in medieval literature. Professor Emeritus Bernardo, 1920-2011, (Department of Romance Languages) co-founded CEMERS in 1966. The endowed lectures are open to the public.

Lino Pertile, Director of Villa I Tatti, will deliver the twenty-second annual Bernardo Lecture on Thursday, November 17, at 5:30 pm in the Anderson Center Reception Room. Professor Pertile's lecture, "Dante's Inferno, Auschwitz, and Poetry," asks whether there a degree of suffering and degradation beyond which a man or a woman ceases to be a human being? A point beyond which our soul dies and what survives is pure physiology? And if yes, to what extent may literature be capable of preserving our humanity in the face of unspeakable pain? These are some of the issues that this lecture considers by considering two systems of suffering, the hells described by Dante in his Inferno and Primo Levi in Survival at Auschwitz.

Click here for a complete list of Bernardo Lectures (.pdf, 41kb)

The Ferber Lecture

This annual lectureship (held in April) is named for the art historian Stanley Ferber, a specialist in medieval sculpture and Northern Renaissance painting who began teaching at Binghamton University in September 1962. Known for his expertise in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish visual culture, Professor Ferber was very active in CEMERS programming in the 1970s.

Having published on a wide range of visual and material culture, from Carolingian ivories to the paintings of Pieter Brueghel, Professor Ferber was perhaps most widely known for the volume he compiled and edited in 1975, “Islam and the Medieval West,” which comprised a catalogue for a loan exhibition held in the Binghamton University Art Gallery, along with the papers and proceedings from the 9th annual CEMERS Conference, also titled “Islam and the Medieval West.”  

Professor Ferber died an untimely death in 1978, and the following year, the Annual Ferber Lectureship was established, to commemorate his scholarship and his humanity.  It is co-sponsored by the Art History Department.

For a complete list of Ferber Lectures, please click below...

Annual Ferber Lecture 2010 (.pdf, 742kb)
Annual Ferber Lecture 2009 (.pdf, 481kb)
See Full List (.pdf, 54kb)