TARII is pleased to introduce a new regular lecture series for our members! In partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq, this lecture series will be held at least twice a year either virtually or at the Embassy in Washington, D.C. It will be an opportunity to learn about the research being conducted by scholars in and on Iraq as well as a chance to network with others in the TARII community. As an introduction to this new series, the first lecture will be open to non-members as well.
Welcoming remarks will be given by Ahmed Utaifa, First Secretary, Head of In-Service and Development Section, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Until recently Mr. Utaifa was the Legal and Cultural Affairs Officer at the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq in Washington, D.C. where he coordinated this new project with TARII. He has long worked in foreign service for Iraq and has lectured numerously on cultural heritage, world history, and cultural diplomacy. We look forward to Mr. Utaifa’s opening remarks to begin this series.
A recording of the lecture is available below.
King of the Four Quarters of the World: The Art and Architecture of Assyrian Kingship
Around 878 BCE, the Assyrian king, Ashurnasirpal II moved his royal capital from its ancestral site to a new location in the town of Kalhu (modern Nimrud, biblical Calah). There he initiated a building program of lavish palaces and temples that set the stage for 250 years of Assyrian royal arts that accompanied the expansion of the largest empire the world had seen to date. This talk provides an overview of the impressive achievements of these imperial arts, examining the architecture, sculpture, and carved reliefs from Kalhu and the subsequent two royal capitals at Dur Shurrukin and Nineveh.
Dr. Marian Feldman
Marian Feldman is the W.H. Collins Vickers Chair in Archaeology and holds a joint appointment in the Departments of the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in art history at Harvard University in ancient Near Eastern art and concentrates on the arts of the late third, second and first millennia BCE in the Near East and Eastern Mediterranean. Her interests range from questions regarding the role of the arts in cultural interactions and collective memory to issues of style, object agency, materiality and space.
Feldman’s first book, Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an ‘International Style’ in the Ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE (Chicago, 2006), investigates the role of artistic hybridity and luxury arts in international diplomacy during the Late Bronze Age. Her second book, Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant (Chicago 2014), examines the ways communities form around -- and by means of -- art objects, focusing on portable luxury items (in particular, ivory and metalwork) in the first half of the first millennium BCE. Feldman has also co-edited several volumes, including Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art (with Brian A. Brown; De Gruyter 2013), and is the author of several articles and catalogue essays. Her current book project investigates aspects of space, affect and agency in late third and early first millennium Mesopotamia.
Professor Feldman has held fellowships at the Institute for Archaeological Research (IAW) at the University of Freiburg (2019), the Internationales Kolleg Morphomata at the University of Cologne (2013), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2008-2009). She was recently a co-PI on the project “Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond,” funded by the Getty Foundation “Connecting Art Histories” Initiative (2017-2020). She was a Getty Foundation “Connecting Art Histories” Visiting Professor at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul (March 2013) and a visiting professor at the University of Heidelberg (June 2010). She taught in the History of Art and Near Eastern Studies Departments at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to Johns Hopkins in 2013.
This first lecture was open to members and non-members. Future in-person lectures in this series will be free for members and available to non-members for a small fee.
