News, Articles, and Events
The 2008 Rice University conference will be devoted to an examination of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, with particular sensitivity extended to the aesthetic, compositional, and performative aspects of the three faiths in their historically appropriate media contexts. Beginning with the pre-modern period and reaching into our postmodern world, the philological, textual paradigm has served as the intellectual matrix for classical and biblical scholarship, for medieval studies and for the study of world religions. The intellectual accomplishments of this paradigm are incontestable, monumental even.
Rice University, Houston, Texas: April 12 – 14, 2008
For more information see the conference Web site .
The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition has completed the migration of its journal Oral Tradition to the web. All 22 years of OT, from 1986 forward, are now available online, open-access, and free of charge as downloadable pdf files. This unique archive of research comprises nearly 10,000 pages and 500 articles on dozens of traditions worldwide from ancient times to the present, and is fully searchable on-site. Please help us spread the word about this facility by contacting colleagues, students, and librarians in your field.
Oral Tradition
Imagine selling 13,025 tickets for oral poetry. Imagine further an entire 6-7 hours of live performances broadcast on regional television as they happen, with excerpts, summaries, and expert commentary on national television. Imagine a one-day event – the final act in a multi-stage, four-year, Olympian drama of qualification and elimination – galvanizing ethnic, national identity to a degree unparalleled virtually anywhere in the world. Imagine the confluence of all of these phenomena and you have the Bertsolari Txapelketa, the national championship of bertsolaritza, the improvised contest poetry from Basque oral tradition, which took place in Barakaldo, Spain, on December 18, 2005.
Read more...
On February 20th, Dr. Rieks Smeets, chief of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section, delivered a talk entitled “Safeguarding Living Heritage: The Story of a Convention” at the University of Missouri.
The entire lecture, together with five examples of intangible cultural heritage, is now available for viewing. The video illustrations include the Carnival of Binche (Belgium), the oral and graphic expressions of the Wajapi (Brazil), the Pansori epic chant (Republic of Korea), the woodcrafting knowledge of the Zafimaniry (Madagascar), and Vanuatu sand drawings (Melanesia).
Dr. Smeets described and illustrated the history of ongoing efforts by the United Nations to foster new approaches to understanding and protecting the cultural heritage of humanity, devoting special attention to the diversity and evolution of the communities and groups that create, re-create, and transmit oral traditions, traditions of music and dance, ritual and festive events, and other forms. He focused on the UNESCO Convention of 2003 for the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage, which has already been ratified by more than 30 member states from six continents, and on the results it has produced so far.
Read more...
On Monday evening, February 20th, at 7:30 pm, Dr. Rieks Smeets, chief of UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage section, will deliver the annual Lloyd B. Thomas Lecture on "Safeguarding Living Heritage" at the University of Missouri.
His talk will also be transmitted worldwide via internet webcast from Missouri’s Center for eResearch. Details on viewing the webcast will be available on this site by February 1st.
Read more...
Reading the Medieval Book examines one of the most important epic poems in thirteenth-century Germany and its redaction in a richly illustrated manuscript created just fifty-five years after the poem's composition. Starkey's book reveals that the Munich-Nuremberg manuscript (c.1270) of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm (c.1215) was compiled with both oral performance and the written medium in mind.
Read more...
Effective mid-January 2005, the University of Missouri inaugurated a Center for eResearch. The primary mission of the CeR is to foster internet-based research across disciplines, both locally on campus and via national and international cooperations. It is crucial to emphasize that all schools, colleges, and intra-college units of its home university, as well as all outside institutions, are welcome and invited to take part in CeR activities, and that the director will make every effort to solicit their initial and continuing participation.
The philosophy behind the establishment of this facility is simple. Today internet-based research is proliferating throughout colleges and universities, just as web-based interactions have revolutionized nearly every sector of our daily lives. A major stumbling block, however, is the fact that individual efforts in e-research have remained highly individual; they have tended to take root and flourish in relative isolation, thriving within their own narrow confines but seldom interacting with efforts by other researchers. To network these “silos” more effectively, the CeR proposes to help e-researchers communicate with one another through local seminars and consultations, webcasts and archived recordings for campus and national/international audiences, national and international agreements, an online journal-newsletter entitled eResearch, and a web page with an updatable database. For more on various CeR initiatives, visit www.e-researchcenter.org.
The home page of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition website features news stories, articles, and announcements of events that are of interest to individuals involved in the comparative field of oral tradition studies. What appears on this page at any given moment is a selection of items that are either time-dependent or of continuing importance of one kind or another. After their currency has expired, we will archive older items in the archive section of the website, so that they can serve as reference material on a permanent basis.
