The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder is holding its annual conference, "From Buddha's Belly to St. Bridget's Head: Sacred and Devotional Objects, East-West," on Thursday, Feb. 14, and Friday, Feb. 15.
The conference, which is free and open to the public, will meet from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Feb. 14 and from 8:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. on Feb. 15 in the British and Irish Studies Room on the fifth floor of Norlin Library at CU-Boulder.
Medieval and renaissance music, both vocal and instrumental, will be performed at the close of the conference's first day on Feb. 14 at 6 p.m. during an evening reception. The seven-member Boulder Renaissance Consort will perform.
The conference will open Thursday morning with remarks by Graham Oddie, associate dean of humanities at CU-Boulder, and Elizabeth Robertson, director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.
Conference speakers' specialties include Medieval and European Baroque Literature, Italian Renaissance Art, Golden Age Spanish Literature, pre-Columbian and Colonial Art History, Medieval Philosophy and Religious Studies, Chinese Daoism and Buddhism, and East Asian Languages and Civilizations.
Some of the featured speakers and their topics include "Gone to Ground: The Holy Well in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland," by Catherine McKenna of Harvard University; "The Object Poisons Sight: Theatrical Recoil from Violence and the Sacred," by Richard McCoy of the State University of New York; and an ending response by Peter Stallybrass of the University of Pennsylvania.
Stallybrass is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities at Pennsylvania. He co-authored "The Politics and Poetics of Transgression" with Allon White and received The Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for "Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory," co-authored with Ann Rosalind Jones.
Several other presentations will be made throughout the two-day conference. The full conference schedule is available at .
The Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies brings together more than 40 faculty members and students at CU-Boulder from several campus humanities departments. For more information on the center, visit the Web site at /.