Heghnar Watenpaugh to Discuss 'Art and Cultural Heritage in Genocide'
What happens to art, artifacts and sacred cultural objects and sites amidst genocide? This question is what Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, professor of art history at UC Davis, will be discussing at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles on Dec. 15.
The lecture, Survivor Objects and Captive Sites: Art and Cultural Heritage in Genocide, is sponsored by the Getty Research Institute Council and is part of the annual Thomas and Barbara Gaehtgens Lecture series, which is dedicated to highlighting leading research in the field of global art history.
"Questions about the impact of genocide and mass violence on cultural heritage, and the ethics of museum collections are the central issues of 21st century art history," Watenpaugh said. "These issues are central to my research and teaching at Davis. I look forward to a wide-ranging conversation at the Getty, an institution that figures prominently in all of these questions."
Watenpaugh researches the visual cultures of the Middle East, including issues of architectural preservation, museums, and cultural heritage. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City: Architecture in Aleppo, received the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Her second book, The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice, published by Stanford University Press in 2019, is the only book to win awards from both the Society for Armenian Studies and the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. The book also won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (non-fiction).
Watenpaugh's research has been supported by fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the President of the University of California.
Register for free tickets or stream the event live on YouTube.
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