Silk Road Worlds, Large and Small: Intersections in Mongol-era Armenia

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• Dr. Kate Franklin, Birkbeck, University of London
• Friday 03 November 2023, 14:00-15:00
• Audit Room, King’s College (and online) .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Said Reza Huseini.

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Abstract: The scalar expanse of the Silk Road as a historical phenomenon and cultural imaginary challenges us to consider how such scales—of distance, difference, and differential desire—might have been understood by people living in ‘small worlds’ scattered across what we now think of as the Silk Road lands. In this talk I frame the span of the medieval Silk Road within the experience of people living in Armenia, specifically the southern region of Vayots Dzor, during the ‘long Mongol thirteenth century.’ I will explore intersections of material culture, modes of political life and human mobilities, as well as considering how the ‘big world’ we now call the Silk Road could be ‘provincialized’ within the lifeworlds of people with local projects as well as universal aspirations.

About the speaker: Kate Franklin is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London. Kate has worked in the Republic of Armenia for more than a decade, with her 2014 PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago focused on the participation of medieval Armenians in the networks of travel and trade now called the medieval Silk Road. Kate’s work explores ideas of place and landscape in materiality and text, and the role of space in entwining the local, the everyday, and the global. Her first book, Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: Living the Silk Road in Medieval Armenia (UCPress 2021) combines historical and archaeological research centered on the role of caravanserais, or inns for travelers, within Armenian political and social life. Her second, co-authored, book Landscapes and Environments of the Middle Ages (Routledge 2023) presents methods and case studies for thinking in interdisciplinary ways about medieval creation, perception, and representations of the ‘natural’ world. Kate is Co-PI of the Vayots Dzor Silk Road Survey, which works to research, record and re-imagine the medieval worlds of Vayots Dzor, Armenia.

This talk is part of the King's Silk Roads series.

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• Audit Room, King’s College (and online)
• King's Silk Roads

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