a presentation by Andras Riedlmayer
Wednesday, 2/25, 1pm
Kotzen Meeting Center (Lefavour Hall)
SPEAKER BIO:
András Riedlmayer (Simmons GSLIS MS 1988) directs the Documentation Center of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library. A specialist in the history and culture of the Ottoman Balkans, he has spent much of the past decade and half documenting the destruction of libraries and other cultural heritage in the armed conflicts in Bosnia (1992-95) and in Kosovo (1998-99). He has testified as an expert witness before the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in the trials of Slobodan Milosevic and other indictees, and in the genocide case brought by Bosnia-Herzegovina against Serbia-Montenegro at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The author of more than 30 articles in scholarly and professional journals, he has served as president of the Turkish Studies Association and as a member of the cultural diversity committee of ARLIS. In 1994, he co-founded the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project, an initiative to trace and recover copies of microfilms and photocopies of some of the thousands of original manuscripts that were destroyed when libraries in Sarajevo were shelled and burned by Serb nationalist forces.