Karène Sanchez Summerer - Unsilencing, Rewriting and Nuancing Palestine (Cleveringa Lecture 2023)
Full lecture title: Unsilencing, Rewriting and Nuancing Palestine: Experiencing and Historicising the Visual Archives of Frank Scholten on Palestine (1921-1923)
During the turbulence of the period after the First World War, Dutch photographer Frank Scholten (1881-1942) travelled to Palestine with the aim of producing an ‘illustrated Bible.’ He first travelled through Italy and Greece in 1920, arriving in Palestine in 1921 where he would stay for two years. While the bulk of his photo collection consists of images of Palestine, his camera lens also gives us a wider snapshot of modernity in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Held at NVIC as this year's Cleveringa Lecture(*), this talk will focus on the unveiling of this big photographic collection, dealing with early 1920s Palestine, as a turning point in the writing of social and cultural history of Palestine, the rewriting of a modern and cosmopolitan Palestine, as well as the links between Holland and the so called Holy Land.
About the speaker
Karène Sanchez-Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University. She is a historian of the Modern Middle East and her research and teaching interests include Christian Arab communities of and in the Middle East Middle East, a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, and minorities in/ diaspora from the Middle East. She is particularly interested in engaging with multilateral transnational connections, still understudied in favour of national historiographies and periodisation. Prof. Sanchez-Summerer is co-editor with Prof. dr. Willem Frijhoff of the series Languages and Culture in History, Amsterdam University Press (since 2015). She is co-editor (with Sary Zananiri) of the book Imaging and Imagining Palestine : Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens, 1918-1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2021.)
Karène Sanchez-Summerer will be introduced by Geert Klein Wolterink, who is an alumnus of Leiden University.
Attention!
The lecture starts at 7 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 6:30 and close them at 7:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.
(*) During the Second World War, on 26 November 1940, Professor Cleveringa of Leiden University gave a speech to protest against the dismissal of two Jewish colleagues. Every year in November, to commemorate his brave speech, Cleveringa Lectures are read by (former) Leiden academics in cities throughout the world. These meetings are connected to the themes of freedom and justice.
