George Manginis, Academic Director at the Benaki Museum in Athens, sheds light on the importance of the Monastery of St. Catherine in Mount Sinai, Egypt—the bridge between Asia and Africa. George reveals how, contrary to popular belief, the monastery has been an important place of pilgrimage for the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
George is the Academic Director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. Since 2001 he has taught Theory of Art History and Archaeology, History of Islamic and Byzantine Art and Architecture and History of Chinese Ceramics for SOAS and the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Benaki Museum – Athens, the Museum of Islamic Art – Qatar, the Institute of Ismaili Studies – London, the New College of the Humanities – London and others. In 2013 he was a ‘Stanley J. Seeger Fellow’ at Princeton University, cataloguing the Chinese collection of the Benaki Museum, where he curated the exhibition ‘Ceramics from China’ (June-September 2016). He also curated the Treasury of the Greek Cathedral of Saint Sophia – London and has excavated in Greece, Cyprus, France and Egypt. He studied archaeology at the University of Athens and completed his PhD on the archaeology of Mount Sinai (Jabal Mūsā) at SOAS.
More about the Monastery of St Catherine can be found here.
This podcast is part of Converging Paths and Arts In Isolation, a partnership with Asia House, kindly supported by the Altajir Trust, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture’s Education Programme.
