Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Young Richard Kim

The UIC Institute for the Humanities presents the Faculty Fellow Lecture Series with Young Richard Kim, head of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at UIC. He will discuss Cyprus and the historiography of Late Antiquity.

As a place where people, goods and ideas constantly moved to, through and from, ancient Cyprus is an ideal locale to think about connectivity and historical change over time, including the transition from the ancient to the medieval Mediterranean.

Over the past 50 years, the historiography of this period — Late Antiquity — has shifted. The recent “environmental turn” has integrated scientific data and methods with literary and material evidence to explain how the ancient world came to an “end.” This approach — consilience — uses various theoretical models to assess the impact of climate change, pathogens, earthquakes and other natural phenomena and how different communities recovered from these setbacks. This lecture will explore the implications of the environmental turn in Late Antiquity by focusing on Cyprus as a case study to demonstrate the potential, and limits, of this approach.

Kim is an associate professor and historian of the ancient Mediterranean world broadly, with specific teaching and research interests in Late Antiquity, late ancient Christianity and Byzantine studies. As an Institute fellow, he is writing a book entitled “Cyprus and the Historiography of Late Antiquity.”

To request accessibility accommodations, please email huminst@uic.edu.