Date: Saturday, November 12, 2011, 3:30pm

Chapter: Pennsylvania

Presenter: Dr. Jessica Goldberg, New York University

Location: Classroom 2, University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Lectures are FREE to ARCE-PA members, $3 for University of Pennsylvania Museum Members, and $5 for the general public.

Description: In the 1890s, over 300,000 manuscript leaves of paper were removed from a storeroom the Ben Ezra synagogue of Old Cairo that had served for 900 years as its geniza, bought by or donated to dozens of collectors, universities, and libraries. In this talk, the story of these papers, their dispersal and the century of scholarship that followed will be examined to see how they have shaped the way these documents have been used in historical scholarship. We will then look at the ways Geniza scholarship is currently being transformed by new efforts at cataloguing, imaging, and digitization, and the challenges and riches that lie ahead.

About the Speaker:Jessica Goldberg is an Assistant Professor of Medieval History at the University of Pennsylvania, where her current work is devoted to a comparative analysis of the institutions and geographies of European and Islamic trade in the eleventh- and twelfth-centuries, with a special interest in the sources of the Cairo Geniza. Her first book, Doing Business in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Cairo Geniza merchants, Economic Institutions and Geographies of Trade in the Eleventh Century will be published this year by Cambridge University Press. Professor Goldberg has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Fellows Program and a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and has been awarded grants for her research from the Mellon Foundation, the University Research Council at Penn, and the Penn Trustee’s Council for Women.