Joel Pattison
Serving God and Mammon: Genoese Merchants in the Medieval Maghrib

In this talk, Joel Pattison will discuss his ongoing research into the importance of religious law—both Christian and Muslim—in structuring economic exchange between Genoa and the Maghrib during the thirteenth century. 

Pattison is the Marian and Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in Medieval Studies and a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley.

Brian Davis
A More Common Ground

Mud stands alongside water itself as the most basic of landscape materials. If we have taken this material for granted in the past, it is only because it is so fundamental that we cannot imagine our favorite places without it. In this talk, the landscape architect Brian Davis will propose that sediment offers a way to create a new public good in response to contemporary social and environmental crises. He will briefly situate this idea in the history of modern landscape architecture and a longer history of landscape making, and will discuss some of the practical and aesthetic implications of this possibility.

Davis is the Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture and associate professor for the Department of Landscape Architecture in the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia.

The shoptalks will be held in English.