Part 1: "The Spoils of War"

Magdalena Coline: A Life in Mediterranean Slavery
Date
Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 4:30 pm6:00 pm
Audience
Public

Speaker

Details

Event Description

Part one of a three-part lecture series. This series is co-sponsored by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies and Princeton University Press.

The "Magdalena Coline: A Life in Mediterranean Slavery" lectures are as follows:

  • Tuesday, April 16: "The Spoils of War"
  • Wednesday, April 17: "The Practices of Slavery in Mediterranean Europe, 1250–1500"
  • Thursday, April 18: "The Passage from Slavery to Freedom"

Daniel Lord Smail is Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100 and 1600 and on deep human history. In medieval European history, his work explores the legal, social, and cultural history of the cities of Mediterranean Europe, with a focus on Marseille in the later Middle Ages. He has covered subjects ranging from women and Jews to legal history and spatial imagination, the subject of his first book, Imaginary Cartographies: Possession and Identity in Late Medieval Marseille (1999). His 2016 book, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe, approaches transformations in the material culture of the later Middle Ages using household inventories and inventories of debt collection from Lucca and Marseille. With other colleagues, he directs the online collection “The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe.” Smail's work in deep history and neurohistory has addressed some of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of these approaches to the human past. His books include The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (2003); On Deep History and the Brain (2008), and, with Andrew Shryock and others, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (2011).

Smail has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and his publications have received several prizes. In 2007, he received the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize from the undergraduates of Harvard University, and, in 2014, the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. In March 2023, he was awarded a Doctor of Arts honoris causa by the Universeit Antwerpen.

Scholarly Series