Ethiopian Devotions Book Launch

Celebrate Ethiopian Devotions; Paintings, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Processional Crosses from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
About this Event

Ethiopian Devotions; Paintings, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Processional Crosses from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Edited by Marilyn E. Heldman and published posthumously, the book features essays by notable scholars as the late Getachew Haile, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Denis Nosnitsin, Marie-Laure Derat and LaVerle Berry discussing various aspects of Ethiopian Orthodox church art, liturgical music, hagiographic traditions and architecture.

Join us for a book launch program with the authors in the spirit of celebrating Heldman’s work and legacy.

Headshot collage: Left to right: LaVerle Berry, Marie-Laure Derat, Kay Kaufman Shelemay

LaVerle Berry was introduction to Ethiopia in 1964 when he joined the Peace Corps and served two years as a teacher there. The experience helped set him on a career path in Ethiopian Studies. In 1976 he received a doctorate in African History from Boston University with a dissertation on Ethiopia's Solomonic kingship, the subject of his subsequent research and publications. Berry met Marilyn Heldman during fieldwork in Ethiopia in 1972-73, beginning a long friendship and scholarly association. Berry taught briefly at Boston, then spent several years in the book division of Time, Inc. In 1985 he joined the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress where he spent nearly 30 years producing research reports and editing several area studies volumes on African countries, including Ethiopia. Berry retired in 2014.

Marie-Laure Derat is a Research Director at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research, France) and a member of the Orient & Méditerranée laboratory. A historian specializing in the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia during the medieval period, she is particularly interested in processes of Christianization, religious interactions, and the territorial organization of civil and religious authorities. Her research draws on both textual and archaeological sources. She leads the historical and archaeological mission in the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela and, along with two other colleagues, the conservation and enhancement program for the Lalibela site (Sustainable Lalibela).

Ethnomusicologist Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Research Professor of Music and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. An Associate Member of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, she has numerous publications in Ethiopian Studies including Music, Ritual, and Falasha History(1986,1989); A Song of Longing: An Ethiopian Journey (1991); Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant: An Anthology (3 vols. plus CD, 1993, 1994, 1997, co-authored with Peter Jeffery); a 2011 double volume of Diaspora, Journal of Transnational Studies, “Creating the Ethiopian Diaspora,” with Steven Kaplan; and Sing and Sing On. Sentinel Musicians and the Making of the Ethiopian American Diaspora (2022).