‘Adoration of the Magi and their Dream’, Manuscript, fol. 003v, c. 1315-25, from Apocryphal Childhood of Christ. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford

Medieval Media Studies: Dreams and the Digital Imaginary
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
6-8 PM
Free and open to all

In conjunction with Mishkin Gallery’s current exhibition Visible Communication, Dr. Alison Griffiths will present a lecture on the rich visual culture of the medieval period and dreaming as a kind of visual thought experiment, one in which ideas associated with cinema, such as embodied viewing, narrative sequencing, projection, and sensory engagement, are palpable in a range of visual and literary works. Opening up these intellectual thought lines across distinct eras can help us extrapolate similarities around ways of imagining the objects, spaces, and sensations of embodied viewing or immersion, reminding us that our contemporary digital landscape (and cinema before that) are not divorced from earlier ways of seeing and believing.

This event coincides with our current exhibition Visible Communication: Works from the Baruch Collection

Dr. Alison Griffiths is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, The City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches film history, visual studies, and media theory. Griffiths is an internationally recognized scholar whose monographs, scholarly articles, and book chapters have had a major impact on the fields of anthropology, cultural history, cinema studies, nineteenth century visual culture, and new media studies.

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