Professor Heghnar Watenpaugh will be a guest speaker at CSU Sacramento’s Festival of the Arts 2022, discussing her book The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript: from Genocide to Justice. Her book examines the eight illuminated pages of a medieval Armenian Gospels manuscript which were discovered in the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2010, prompting a lawsuit. Watenpaugh investigated the biography of this manuscript, and how art history intersected with cultural heritage and painful histories of genocide and migration.

In this talk, Watenpaugh follows the manuscript from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom, showing how the tale of the separation of the pages from the manuscript tells a story of destruction and survival, and makes the case for a human right to art. 

This public lecture will be held on Thursday, April 21 from 1:30 – 2:30pm in Forest Suite, University Union.