CSMC News (2022)

21 April 2022|CSMC News

Medieval Multilingual Manuscripts

Photo: De Gruyter

The new edition of 'Studies in Manuscript Cultures' is now available as open access. The volume contains twelve studies of individual manuscripts, which together provide cross-cultural evidence for inter-language exchange in medieval Europe and Asia.

11 April 2022|CSMC News

Chapane Mutiua Succesfully Defends Doctoral Dissertation

Photo: UHH

Chapane Mutiua has passed his viva voce examination, thus completing his doctoral project 'Bridging the Land to the Sea: Tenzi Literature, Oral Historiography and the Construction of Identities from late 19th Century Angoche'.

6 April 2022|CSMC News

The Development of Literacy in the Caucasian Territories

Photo: Jost Gippert

New ERC project at CSMC: Starting this April, Jost Gippert and his team will explore how languages in the Southern Caucasus have developed their literature and influenced each other since Late Antiquity.

5 April 2022|CSMC News

Preserving the Bhatta Family Manuscript Collection

Photo: Bidur Bhattarai

In collaboration with the Bhatta family, CSMC has started a project to preserve the Bhatta Family Manuscript Collection at Changu Narayan. The collection is of great value not only in the context of Nepalese history and culture.

4 April 2022|CSMC News

CSMC and National Library of Israel Collaborate on Ambitious Digitisation Project

Photo: National Library of Israel / CSMC

The National Library of Israel houses the written estates of many important German-Jewish personalities. In a joint project, CSMC and NLI are making 24 of these historical archives digitally accessible.

28 March 2022|CSMC News

Barakat Trust Early-Career Conservation Interns Present First International Conference Papers

Photo: NLPCPM

As part of the Kairouan Manuscript Project, the Barakat Trust funds a one-year internship for early-career conservators at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts in Raqqada,Tunisia. They recently presented their work at an international conference...

25 March 2022|CSMC News

German Ambassador and Cultural Attaché Visit Branch Office in Kathmandu

Preserving the Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal

Photo: CSMC

Thomas Prinz, German ambassador to Nepal, has visited the Nepal Research Bhavan in Kathmandu to learn about the CSMC project 'Preserving the Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal’.

24 March 2022|CSMC News

Kairouan Manuscript Project Starts 2022 Training in Collection Care and Management

Photo: Wadie Missaoui

The Kairouan Manuscript Project (KMP) has started its 2022 Training in Collection Care and Management. It is supported by two new partners: the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University and the Old Books New Science Lab at the University of Toronto Mississauga

23 March 2022|CSMC News

Research for Lunch

Photo: CSMC

This April, CSMC will launch the Digital Lunch Seminar Series. Covering a broad range of topics, each session will feature a pair of researchers from different disciplines who will share insights on clay tablets, palm leaf manuscripts, Tibetan Maps, and the DNA of written artefacts.

21 March 2022|CSMC News

The Timbuktu Manuscript Training Project

Photo: Nicolas Réméné

Together with the United Nations and the Ahmed Baba Institute, CSMC has launched a training project on manuscript conservation, digitisation, and cataloguing in Timbuktu. The two-year course aims to enable young Malians to preserve a unique manuscript collection in a conflict-ridden community.

7 March 2022|CSMC News

Graduate Student Conference on Medieval Chinese Manuscript Culture

Photo: CSMC

From 14 to 16 March, CSMC will host the Cambridge-Paris-Hamburg Graduate Student Conference on Medieval Chinese Manuscript Culture. The event is organised in partnership with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge and the École française d'Extrême-Orient.

1 March 2022|CSMC News

Sebastian Schirrmeister Joins CSMC

Photo: Sebastian Schirrmeister

The literary scholar joins the Cluster of Excellence on 1 March. He will be working on the project 'Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives'.

28 February 2022|CSMC News

Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence

Photo: Gwen Melzer

The proceedings of the workshop 'Humanities-Centred Artificial Intelligence' (CHAI), which was part of the 44th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence from 27 September to 1 October 2021, are now available online.

24 February 2022|CSMC News

Letters from Mesopotamia

Left: A scribe of Til Barsip. Right: Cuneiform tablet production.

Photo: X. Faivre, C. Michel

Hardly anyone knows the culture of ancient Mesopotamia better than Cécile Michele. In her blog 'Mesopotamian Bulletins', now published for the first time in English, she reflects on the significance of this culture for the present and addresses the manifold dangers facing its preservation today.

23 February 2022|CSMC News

Agnieszka Helman-Ważny Appointed Professor of Social Sciences at Warsaw

Photo: Agnieszka Helman-Ważny

The faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies at the University of Warsaw has appointed Agnieszka Helman-Ważny Research Professor of Social Sciences, with a focus on Book and Media History.

21 February 2022|CSMC News

Vacant Research Associate Position

Photo: CSMC

We invite applications for the position of research associate to provide academic support in planning and implementing the Cluster conference 'Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives' in September 2023. Deadline for applications is 7 March.

14 February 2022|CSMC News

Manuscripts and Violence

Photo: Universität Erfurt

The spring series of the Gotha Manuscript Talks 2022 explores the fate of manuscripts in historical episodes of violence and during disruptive events affecting whole societies. The lecture series is organised by the Gotha Research Library in cooperation with CSMC.

9 February 2022|CSMC News

Launch of the Batak Manuscripts Digitisation Project

Photo: British Library

On 18 February, the British Library and CSMC will hold an online event to celebrate the launch of the Batak Manuscripts Digitisation Project.

1 February 2022|CSMC News

J. P. Gumbert Dissertation Award 2022: Deadline Extended

Photo: CSMC

With the J. P. Gumbert Dissertation Award, the CSMC honours the best doctoral thesis defended in 2021 that contributes to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. The deadline for nominations has been extended to 25 March 2022.

31 January 2022|CSMC News

New Issue of 'manuscript cultures' published

Photo: CSMC

Volume 17 of the journal 'manuscript cultures' is out now. This edition contains the proceedings of the conference 'One Text, Many Forms – A Comparative View of the Variability of Swahili Manuscripts'. Like all previous editions, it is available as open access.