"Queer Fragments of Byzantium" with Dr. Roland Betancourt

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies is a part of SFU: The Canadian university that is Engaging the World

SFU Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies

Join us on Friday, January 31st for a new installment in our 2025 Spring Seminar Series

Room 7200, WAC Bennett Library

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present <a href="https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6060" title="https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6060" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Roland Betancourt</a>, University of California, Irvine.Join us Friday, January 31st at 2:30pm in person at the Bennett Library, SFU Burnaby, Room 7200, or online (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87840050895), for his talk "Queer Fragments of Byzantium".This talk will be moderated by <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/e-freeman.html" title="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/e-freeman.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dr. Evan Freeman</a>, Assistant Professor, Global Humanities and Hellenic Canadian Congress of BC Chair in Hellenic Studies.Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be recorded.This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the <a href="https://trk2.cp20.com/click/ds9u-2vguei-i8x8z4-cocw1z80/" title="https://trk2.cp20.com/click/ds9u-2vguei-i8x8z4-cocw1z80/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Stavros Niarchos Foundation</a> (SNF).

ABSTRACTIn modern art and popular culture, Byzantium is rarely represented and when it is, it appears through cursory allusions. This talk will look at the fragments of Byzantium in modern popular culture to study the ways in which queer artists and authors deployed the period to imagine an alternative to the western Middle Ages.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY<a href="https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6060" title="https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6060" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Roland Betancourt</a> is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art from 2024-2026 and a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also Chancellor’s Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the Byzantine Empire, including its art, liturgy, and theology, with an interest in issues of sexuality, gender identity, and race. Betancourt is the author of four monographs, including The Secrets We Keep: Hidden Histories of the Byzantine Empire (Getty Research Institute, 2024) and Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020). Byzantine Intersectionality won the Jerome E. Singerman Book Prize from the Medieval Academy of America.

MODERATOR BIOGRAPHY<a href="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/e-freeman.html" title="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/humans/people/e-freeman.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Evan Freeman</a> studies art and ritual of the Byzantine Empire and cross-cultural interactions in the wider medieval world. He completed his PhD in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University and has held an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Smarthistory, the Center for Public Art History, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Before joining the Department of Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University, he taught at Queens College, City University of New York, and Portland State University. He has produced videos, essays, an edited volume, and other open educational resources for Smarthistory, Khan Academy, and other digital and public humanities projects. His research focuses on Byzantine ritual objects, mobility, monumental church art, and materiality.

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