University of Heidelberg

2010 Conference Participation 

Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies

Anja Eisenbeiß represented project D3 at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies , Philadelphia, March 25–28, 2010. She participated in the panel “Picturing the Foreign: Images of East and West in Visual and Literary Culture from 1400 to Present”, chaired by Xiaoling Shi, Rhodes College, on Sunday, March 28.

This panel brought together five scholars from the United States, Germany and Austria to address East-West cross-cultural communication and representation issues. Unified by the theme of images in visual and literary culture, the panel crossed temporal, geographical and disciplinary borders by integrating studies of fifteenth-century French illustrations of Islam in illuminated manuscripts, pre-1800 German and Dutch printed portrayals of China, eighteenth-century Chinese paintings of Europe, Chinese literary impressions of London in the 1920s, and American depictions of Filipinos in Coca-Cola’s advertising campaigns of the 1950s.

Anja Eisenbeiß spoke on “Getting in touch: Cross-cultural encounters in late medieval French manuscripts”, a topic stemming from her ongoing research within project D3 “Images of Alterity in East and West”.

Read more about the conference  

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During a research stay in London (September 20th to 27th, 2008) Lieselotte E. Saurma and Anja Eisenbeiß have intensified collaboration with colleagues on site. Several meetings and a round-table were dedicated to discussing the flow of knowledge on otherness between Western medieval and Near Eastern cultures as well as its impact on illuminated manuscripts. Medical, astrological, mathematical, and philosophical works, but also texts on experimental knowledge like optics or on knowledge of daily life as documented in books on nature and animals, works on historiography, and even romances were transferred to the West. On the other hand, Western books and treatises, even Western epics, which originally came from the Far East, made their way back into Islamic manuscript culture. Within both traditions, these works left such a permanent appeal, that they were copied and imitated, and even totally new modes of mise-en-page emerged following from the engagement with extrinsic visual practices, which were closely linked to extrinsic knowledge. As a result, analysing mise-en-page in Eastern and Western illuminated manuscripts, its standardization, variation as well as adaptation to different text genres, is a suitable subject to add insight to transcultural knowledge transfer on alterity, going well beyond traditional theories of reciprocal influence. This new field of research will thus be added to the project’s agenda.

Ladenburg, Karl Benz Zentrum

A first constitutive meeting and workshop was held at the Karl Benz Zentrum, Ladenburg (May 30th to June 1st, 2008). Amongst the participants representing project D3 were the project coordinators – Anja Eisenbeiß and Lieselotte E. Saurma –, Annette Hoffmann, member of the Heidelberg work group, and the project’s international partners Monica Juneja, Larry Silver, and Michael Stolz. The Cluster was represented by Maren Christine Härtel (HRA2), Markus Hilgert (D2), and members of the project on the Mongolian invasion (D1), which allowed for intensifying both the collaboration within research area D and with the transvisual database work group. The workshop has clarified the specific research topics of the team members, who gave short presentations of their work so far. 

Learn more about the programme: click here
Read the workshop report: click here 

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