New Media and Ancient Worlds: An Evening with Edward Bleiberg and David J. Peterson

April 13, 2016
06:00 PM - 08:30 PM
Hawkins-Carlson Room, Rush Rhees Library

River Campus Libraries, The Neilly Endowment, and the Humanities Center invite you to learn about innovative media and the extraordinary past and fascinating future of human language. Join Edward Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian, classical, and ancient Middle Eastern art at the Brooklyn Museum, and David Peterson, language inventor and the creator of the Dothraki and Valyrian languages for HBO’s Game of Thrones, who will share their insights about the connection between history, culture, and the development of new media.

Bleiberg is the author of "Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt" and of several books and articles on ancient Egyptian economy, Egyptian coffins, collecting Egyptian art, and the Jewish minority in ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. His lecture, “From Scrolls to Screens: 5000 Years of New Media,” will review the five major media shifts that radically changed the way knowledge has been shared throughout history, and will show how understanding those historical transitions allow us to better understand our current use of media.

Bleiberg graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After graduate work at Yale University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Toronto

Peterson is the author of The Art of Language Invention and Living Language Dothraki. Together with Game of Thrones, he has created languages for a number of films and television series, including Defiance, The Shannara Chronicles, The 100, and Emerald City. In his lecture, “New Media Linguistics: Developing Languages for Game of Thrones,” he will provide a rare glimpse into the process of language creation for a fictional world of the Middle Ages, and will share the main challenges and achievements this process entails.

Peterson received his B.A. in English and Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, San Diego.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Free parking is available in the Library Lot.

Sponsored jointly by the Humanities Project, a program of the University of Rochester Humanities Center and the Neilly Endowment, River Campus Libraries.

Category: Humanities Project Events