View of the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba from the Guadalquivir River (Cornelia Steffens, 2015)

The Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba

Michele Lamprakos (University of Maryland-College Park)

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba is both a great monument of world architecture and a potent reminder of the Islamic past in Spain. Converted into a cathedral following the Castilian conquest (1236), the Great Mosque survived in a strange hybrid form: with a towering choir-presbytery in the middle. The building’s identity – is it a mosque, a cathedral, or both? – has long been a flashpoint for larger conflicts in Spanish society. This lecture explores cycles of patronage, demolition, erasure, and restoration as a barometer of changing attitudes toward the Islamic past, and the meaning of that past for Spanish culture and society.

Michele Lamprakos is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, University of Maryland-College Park. Trained as an architect and architectural historian, her research focuses on two main themes: the lives and layers of buildings and sites; and the entangled histories of Islam and Christianity in the Mediterranean. This lecture draws on her forthcoming book, Memento Mauri: the Afterlife of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, which will be published by University of Texas Press.

Art in the Longue Durée: This year’s lecture series will feature scholars who take a longue durée approach to investigating cities, sites, and artifacts. Many of the sites and artworks we study today have been produced through on-going processes of transformation, interpretation, and memorialization. Such works raise questions about the relationship between the past and present, even as they invite us to consider the role of memory, war, theories of preservation, and politics in the creation of historic cities, monuments, museum objects, and ruins. Taking a longue durée (or biographical) approach productively shifts the focus of scholarly investigation from moments of origin to on-going processes of creation, calling on us to consider the layered histories that develop over time.

Save the dates for these upcoming lectures (unless specified, lectures take place 4:30 - 5:45 PM in Arts 1332):

• Thursday, April 6: Cherise Smith (University of Texas at Austin), Topic TBA
• Thursday, May 18: Claudia Zapata (UCLA), Topic TBA