Lynn Ransom
Lynn Ransom joined Penn Libraries in February 2008 as the Project Manager for the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts and is a founding member of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. Lynn holds a B.A. in art history from the University of the South and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in medieval art history, with an emphasis on manuscript illumination. Before coming to Penn, Lynn held positions in the manuscript collections at the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. She also served as a researcher at the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University. She has published on manuscript illumination of the 13th and 16th centuries. Her current research interests involve the provenance of medieval manuscripts and the research potential of Name Authorites in Linked Open Data contexts.
Lynn oversaw the NEH-funded redevelopment of the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts (2014-2017) into an open-access, user-maintained finding aid for the world's pre-modern manuscripts and served as the Principal Investigator for the US team on the Mapping Manuscript Migrations project, a Round 4 Trans-Atlantic Platform Digging into Data Challenge Award recipient (2017-2020). She is currently serving as the Director of Digital Medievalist (until 2022) and the President and Executive Director of Digital Scriptorium (2021-2023). She is also Co-Editor of the Schoenberg Institute's journal Manuscript Studies. A list of her other publications can be found here.
Geographically, the oasis city of Dunhuang occupied a strategic position on the northwestern edge of the Chinese cultural sphere, connecting the Chinese states with Central Asia, known at the time as the Western Regions. During the tenth century, Dunhuang was inhabited by a multilingual population that produced a vast quantity of manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan and over a dozen of other languages. At the turn of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of these manuscripts were discovered in a sealed-off Buddhist cave, leading to the development of entirely new fields of scholarly research and the decipherment of several long-forgotten languages. The manuscripts provide an unprecedented amount of information on the linguistic, economic, social and religious dimensions of contemporary life. Even though they were found together in the same cave, and had been produced by the same group of people, they are typically studied by specialists of respective languages and disciplines. In an attempt to bridge the linguistic barrier, this talk proposes to look at Chinese manuscripts in a wider context, connecting them with non-Chinese scribal cultures of Central Asia. One of my aims is to draw attention to the degree of interaction and mutual influence between these traditions, attesting to the mixed nature of local population.
Registration is required, but free and open to the public via this link.
More information about the SIMS Online Lecture Series can be found here.
Imre Galambos is Director of Studies in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Robinson College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Translating Chinese Tradition and Teaching Tangut Culture: Manuscripts and Printed books from Khara-Khoto (2015) and co-author of Manuscripts and Travellers: The Sino-Tibetan Documents of a Tenth-Century Buddhist Pilgrim (2011). Prior to his appointment at Cambridge, Dr. Galambos was part of the International Dunhuang Project team at the British Library.
