Join us Tuesday, October 25 in Keating 1st Auditorium, where Fordham History faculty member Nicholas Paul will talk about the twin phenomena of death and disappearance at great distance in the age of the crusades. Dr. Paul’s research into missing crusaders stems from his 2012 book To Follow in their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages, which last year was awarded the John Nicholas Brown Prize by the Medieval Academy of America. Reflecting on the research that he did for the book, Dr. Paul will talk about the larger problem of death and disappearance, especially when soldiers are fighting at very great distances from their homelands, and the implications of these experiences for their own communities. Why do some societies, like United States in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, become consumed by a sense of loss and the urgency of recovery, and what technologies have evolved to combat war’s most insidious consequence: oblivion?
