The dangers, intrigue and violence of medieval and early modern warfare and statecraft will be the focus of the twelfth annual Marco Symposium at UT from April 9 to 11.
The symposium, “‘Cry Havoc!’ War, Diplomacy, and Conspiracy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” will feature scholars from various disciplines and will explore these issues and assess their relevance to contemporary times.
The Marco Institute will hold the symposium in conjunction with the UT Center for the Study of War and Society. All lectures are free and open to the public.
Ted Gup, professor of journalism at Emerson College, will deliver the keynote lecture entitled “The C.I.A. and Intelligence-Gathering Post-9/11: Transformations and Consequences” at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 9, in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of UT John C. Hodges Library.
Gup, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work on the Central Intelligence Agency, is a former reporter for the Washington Post and Time magazine, a grant recipient of the MacArthur Foundation and a Guggenheim fellow, and the author of two trade books on intelligence operations in the United States.
The symposium will consider conflict, threat, and contact from the Crusades through the Hundred Years War to the Thirty Years. It also will explore strategies of terror and piracy as well as technologies of surveillance and intelligence gathering.
“The past is always relevant to the present, but the later Medieval and Renaissance periods’ toxic cocktail of religious violence, raison d’etat, and espionage is especially so, since we live in an age awash in the same drink,” said Thomas E. Burman, Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute.
Symposium sessions will be held at the International House Great Room, 1623 Melrose Ave. They will be led by scholars who will speak on various topics, including the diplomatic technologies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and the reshaping of the role of the spy and the ambassador to accommodate new global realities.
For more information on the symposium and to see a full list of speakers, visit the website.
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CONTACT:
Vera Pantanizopoulos-Broux (865-974-1859, marco@utk.edu)