Routes, Encounters, Destinations in Medieval Asia (ca. 500–1500)

This conference, organized by Gian Piero Persiani (EALC) and Adam Newman (Religion), will bring together scholars working across disciplines to explore how movement, exchange, and place-making shaped the medieval Asian world.

Throughout history, people, objects, and knowledge have been on the move, crossing borders, merging in unexpected ways, and continually reshaping cultural and political landscapes. Movement, however, is never abstract—it unfolds through and between places both real and imagined: between origins and destinations, in cities and across frontiers, and along seas, rivers, deserts, and pilgrimage routes. Movement and destination thus exist in a dynamic and dialogical relationship, each defining and transforming the other.

This conference examines these entwined histories of mobility and emplacement in Medieval South, Central, and East Asia between 500 and 1500 CE. Participants will approach the topic from diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives, exploring how travel, exchange, and encounter produced religious missions and pilgrimages; facilitated the transmission, translation, and localization of texts and ideas; fostered multilingualism and intertextuality; and animated networks of trade and diplomacy. Equally important will be attention to the physical and imagined sites that anchored these processes—urban centers, frontier zones, ports of exchange, sacred landscapes, and celebrated sites of natural beauty.

 Proposed themes include:

• Pilgrimage and sacred geographies: routes, shrines, and travelers.
• Routes and networks of knowledge: monastic and scholarly communities, texts, and maps.
• Cityscapes and landscapes: ports, borderlands, and scenic sites.
• Multilingualism and translation: linguistic crossings and literary exchange.
• Trade, objects, and material culture: movement of commodities and artistic forms.