Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Young Richard Kim, Classics and Mediterranean Studies and History, “Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity: The Environmental Turn”
Faculty Fellow Lecture Series
January 23, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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As a place where people, goods, and ideas constantly moved to, through, and from it, ancient Cyprus is an ideal locale to think about connectivity and historical change over time, including the transition from the ancient to the medieval Mediterranean. Over the past fifty years, the historiography of this period — Late Antiquity — has periodically shifted, and the recent “environmental turn” has integrated scientific data and methods with literary and material evidence to explain how the ancient world came to an “end.” This approach, consilience, deploys various theoretical models to assess the impact of climate change, pathogens, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena and how different communities recovered from setbacks caused by changes in the environment. This lecture will explore the implications of the environmental turn in Late Antiquity by focusing specifically on Cyprus as a case study to demonstrate the potential, and limits, to this approach.
Young Kim is Associate Professor and Head of Classics and Mediterranean Studies, with an additional appointment in History. He is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world broadly, with specific teaching and research interests in Late Antiquity, Late Ancient Christianity, and Byzantine Studies. As an Institute fellow, he is currently writing a book entitled Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity.
Contact huminst@uic.edu to request accessibility accommodations.
Date posted
May 23, 2024
Date updated
Jan 13, 2025