HOMEWARD BOUND: Returning Displaced Books and Manuscripts
Sunday April 6, 2008
Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 5th Avenue
New York, New York
10:00AM - 12:00PM
On April 6, 2008 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hosted SAFE’s second book history symposium entitled “HOMEWARD BOUND: Returning Displaced Books and Manuscripts” which addressed the issue of book and manuscript ownership. Speakers presented three twenty-minute papers ranging in topics from the history of the repatriated Medieval Icelandic manuscripts to the contested Iraqi Jewish Archive discovered in Baghdad in 2003. The differences between ‘cultural property’ and ‘cultural heritage’ were also addressed as were such questions as: How does the debate over the identification and repatriation of art and antiquities impact the world of books? How should libraries and private collectors treat books and manuscripts with questionable provenance? Should unique or looted items be returned to their countries of origins? What do case studies of recent and pending book returns reveal about the current climate of cultural heritage ownership and stewardship?
Organized by SAFE member, Irina Tarsis, the event was well attended and sparked a discussion as to how the model of the amicable return of Icelandic manuscripts could be applied to other situations where ownership is unclear or contested.
Members of the panel included:
Henry S. Martin III
Lucille A. Roussin
Ken Soehner
Jeff Spurr
Patrick J. Stevens
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Henry S. Martin III is a Henry N. Ess III Librarian & a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He will moderate the symposium.
Lucille A. Roussin is the founder and director of the Holocaust Restitution Claims Practicum at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, where she teaches a seminar, Remedies for Wartime Confiscation. She also teaches a course on "Art, the Law and Professional Ethics" at the School of Graduate Studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is an associate with the firm of McCallion & Associates and earned her law degree in 1996 from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where she was a Belkin Scholar. She was Deputy Research Director of the Art and Cultural Property Team of the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Assets and was an associate in the Art and International Law Practice Group at Herrick, Feinstein LLP in New York City. In 2001, she negotiated the first restitution of a rare Jewish ritual object to a private family in the United States.
Ken Soehner is the Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian at the Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He will present welcoming remarks.
Jeff Spurr is an Islamic and Middle East Specialist in Harvard University's Fine Arts Library. He will discuss the fate of Iraqi Jewish Archive in a paper entitled “Contested Patrimony: The Fate of the Iraqi Jewish Archive.”
Patrick J. Stevens is curator of the Fiske Icelandic Collection in the Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections of Cornell University Library. He will present a paper entitled “Compensating Genius: Iceland's Medieval Manuscripts and their Repatriation from Denmark.”
