About the Event
Roxann Prazniak is Professor of History at the Robert D. Clark Honors College at the University of Oregon. She specializes in the history of China and Eurasia, the emergence of modernity, and transcultural studies.
Through fieldwork in rural China that examines visual evidence from manuscript illuminations and frescoes that fuse Persian, Islamic, Italian, Greek, and Buddhist elements, Dr. Prazniak’s current work traces the dynamics of cultural flow across Eurasia during the Mongol era. In her Katherine Tsanoff Brown lecture, she considers Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s work and its Eurasian context.
Dr. Prazniak’s writings include Of Camel Kings and Other Things: Rural Rebels Against Modernity in Late Imperial China (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); “Ilkhanid Buddhism: Traces of a Passage in Eurasian History” (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2014); and “Tabriz on the Silk Roads: Thirteenth-Century Eurasian Cultural Connections” (The Asian Review of World Histories, 2013). Her recent publication, Sudden Appearances: Visuality and Belief in Mongol Eurasia, includes research from the Northwest National Minorities University in Lanzhou, Gansu (China); the rare documents collection of the Bibliothèque (BnF) in Paris; Ladakh in the Himalayas; and the Topkapi Library in Istanbul, Turkey.
Dr. Prazniak has presented her work widely both in the United States and internationally, including at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Institute of Dunhuang Studies at Lanzhou University; and the Confucius Institute for Scotland at Edinburgh University, among many others.
The Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture Series honors Katherine Tsanoff Brown, Rice University’s first teacher of art history, later the Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, and an ardent supporter of public lectures and visiting scholars in the arts.
