The Silk Roads: Connecting Communities, Markets, and Minds Since Antiquity

The Silk Roads: Connecting Communities, Markets, and Minds Since Antiquity

Lecture by Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 4:00 - 5:00 p.m. 

Doheny Memorial Library (DML), Room 240

The Silk Roads were networks that have played a crucial role in world history over many millennia. In this talk, Peter Frankopan will explain how to understand the connections that helped enable exchange, spread religions and ideas, and facilitate the spread of pathogens and disease from antiquity to the present day – and will talk about how to move away from Eurocentric readings of history.

This event is being held in conjunction with the opening of the Doheny Memorial Library exhibition "The Silk Roads: Connecting Communities, Markets, and Minds Since Antiquity,” which will be on view on the first floor of the library through May 31. This exhibition is the collaborative product of many people in departments, museums, and institutions at USC and beyond. 

About the speaker: Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Worcester College, University of Oxford and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, as well as Senior Research Fellow. He works on the history of the Mediterranean, Russia, the Middle East, Persia, Central and Southern Asia, and on relations between Christianity and Islam, focusing on connections and exchange. He is the author of The New Silk Roads: The New Asia and the Remaking of the World Order (2019), The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2016) as well as The First Crusade: The Call from the East (2012).