Haunted by history, Famagusta’s dramatic cityscape on the island of Cyprus remains an exceptional witness to the force and fragility of the Crusading enterprise. For a time in the early fourteenth century, the wealth of the world pulsed through Famagusta as Asian luxury goods met Mediterranean commerce in its ports and fostered a building boom of flamboyant civic splendor. Placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list of Earth’s most endangered cultural sites in early 2008, the city built by the convergence of cultures is now threatened. Annemarie Weyl Carr examines this fascinating town in the long story of Europe on the verge of Asia for the Tenth Anniversary of the Catherine H. Campbell Memorial Art History lecture. Ms Carr is a Professor of Art History, Emerita, at Southern Methodist University.

Each year a nationally or internationally prominent art historian is invited to give the Catherine H. Campbell Memorial Art History Lecture at the Myers School of Art. Past years have included such notable speakers as Robert Storr, former Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl, Dr. Lucy Freedman Sandler of New York University, James Elkins, The School of Art Institute of Chicago, and Irving Sandler, New York art critic, historian, and author.