Art History Speaker Series

Barbara Abou-El-Haj
What's the Matter with Pilgrimage Studies? History, Historiography, Hagiography and the Camino de Santiago

POSTPONED due to weather

Yeager Recital Hall

Barbara Abou-El-Haj (Associate Professor and Chair of Studies in the History and Theory of Art and Architecture at SUNY- Binghamton) will present: “What's the Matter with Pilgrimage Studies? History, Historiography, Hagiography and the Camino de Santiago" in Yeager Recital Hall at 6:00 p.m.

Abou-el-Haj’s lecture will examine the role of pilgrims and pilgrimage, fundamental to the historiography of Santiago de Compostela, to ask what is overlooked and who is excluded in a history that concerns itself almost entirely with the consumption, not the production, of the cult of Saint James.

She will review the production of the cult in the twelfth century, the documentary sources for Santiago and their modern asymmetrical circulation. She will then trace the centerpiece of pilgrimage studies, the history of the Camino de Santiago (Route or Way of Saint James), its revival in the nineteenth century and its role in political ideology and cultural capital in the twentieth century from Franco’s Spain to its incarnation as an icon for European unity and a premier destination in the trans regional heritage industry.