Ömür Harmanşah participated at Annual Marco Symposium “Local and Global Perspectives on Materiality in the Premodern World“
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, March 7-8, 2025
The Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) held its annual Marco Symposium last weekend, titled “Local and Global Perspectives on Materiality in the Premodern World.“ Professor Harmanşah was invited to the symposium by the organizers Stephen Collins-Elliott (Classics) and Megan Bryson (Religious Studies), and contributed with a paper on “Materiality and Temporality of the Future Artifact.”
The Marco Symposium is held every year in March or April. The Symposium brings leading experts in their field to the University of Tennessee for two days of talks on that year’s theme. A round-table discussion by all the participants concludes the weekend. This year’s Symposium explored different definitions of materiality and objecthood, developing a new vocabulary of understanding in local and global perspectives in the premodern world from antiquity to the early modern period. Presentations examine object-driven narratives through multidisciplinary case-studies, asking how our understanding of the past changes when we treat human relationships as entangled with objects. More specifically, this symposium aims to bridge disparate contexts by drawing together the ways in which local societies have approached their material entanglements, toward highlighting how each case-study can inform new theoretical positions and methodological approaches toward our understanding other past contexts.