The autumn semester
is about to start here in Norway and I return to blogging again.
I want to
dedicate the first blog post this autumn to the second conference organised by the
University of Agder-based research project The Lying Pen of Scribes, called Fragments
of an Unbelievable Past? Constructions of Provenance, Narratives of Forgeries.
The conference, which will take place in Kristiansand (Norway) 14-16 September,
brings together academics and media professionals from Europe and the US to
discuss the role, importance and ethical challenges pertaining to manuscript provenance; the various outcomes
of the overlaps between media, market and academia; as well as to explore scholarly and
media made stories of manuscript finds and forgeries. The conference will
revisit some of the last decades’ most debated cases, such as the James Ossuary,
the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife saga, the Museum/Green Scholars Initiative, the Nag
Hammadi find stories, and if I am not mistaken, we will also be introduced to
some recent finds, some newly surfacing fragments, and publication initiatives
that have proven particularly problematic.
I will give the
paper “Media Dynamics and Academic Knowledge Production: Tracing the Role of
the Media in the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Saga”. In this paper I will approach the
GJW saga as a case, discussing three ways in which media/the Media mattered to,
took part in and possibly shaped academic knowledge production. I will first explore
the relationship between the work of academics and media professionals at key stages of the development of the saga. Second, I will focus on the input
of academics in particular, discussing how and the extent to which media/the
Media may have mattered to the ways in which individual contributions, as well
as the academic debate as such, were shaped. Third and finally, I will explore the GJW
saga from a history of publishing point of view, that is, a broader media
historical perspective: what did we learn, what’s new, and how do media/the
Media matter to academic knowledge production?
The Unbelievable
Past-conference has a great line up, you find the program here.
