The Benaki Museum pays tribute to its long-standing director, the late Angelos Delivorrias, who envisioned and implemented its expansion and satellite scheme, by establishing the ‘Angelos Delivorrias’ Annual Lectures. Every March, a speaker active in one of the many cognitive fields in which Delivorrias excelled, will be invited to deliver a lecture, which will be published in printed form as part of a series.
This year’s lecture will be given by Ingela Nilsson, Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies, Uppsala University, Deputy Dean of the Faculty Languages, and is entitled Living in a material world: the storyworlds of objects.
The study of storytelling most often focuses on texts, since stories tend to be preserved in textual form. In the case of ancient and medieval texts, they were preserved in manuscripts made of parchment or paper, which means that they also have a material form and can be studied as artefacts in themselves. Such manuscripts can tell important stories of the production, circulation, and use of the book itself and accordingly also of its content. But not only texts and books tell stories – as a matter of fact, all objects have the capacity of mediating stories.
In this lecture, Ingela Nilsson will discuss different kinds of such material storytelling, using objects from the Benaki Museum collection as examples. Nilson’s aim is to make visible the way in which many objects that surround us, whether they are old or new, invite us to take part in their stories and enter their storyworlds.
The lecture will be given in English.
Ingela Nilsson is a Professor of Greek, specializing in Byzantine literature at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, and she is Deputy Dean at the Faculty of Languages, at the Uppsala University, with responsibility for research and doctoral studies (2023–26). Since 2024, Nilsson serves as a judge on the panel for the literary Runciman Award.
Her overarching research interest concerns different processes of literary adaptation and translation, within and across languages. Much of her work has been focused on Greek and Byzantine literature, especially fiction. Nilsson also has an interest in historiography and other forms of literature written in Greek primarily from twelfth-century Byzantium and often with a narratological perspective. She is currently the PI of the research programme “Retracing Connections: Byzantine Storyworlds in Greek, Arabic, Georgian, and Old Slavonic (c. 950–1100)” (2020-27).