Tomás Harris Lecture 2026: Lamia Balafrej

Lecture 1: Before the Black Box: Labor, Difference, and Automata

 The analytical category of “hidden labor” is often used in scholarship to denounce the illusion of modern automation—how the automatic machine, as a black box, dissimulates its production and maintenance. Although it may sound distinctly modern, the critique of the self-acting device as deceptive, due notably to its reliance on concealed labor, was already common in medieval sources, both Latinate and Arabic. This discourse, moreover, tended to focus on foreign devices like animated or suspended idols; in such cases, the tone was often racializing, in the sense that it ascribed both alterity and such negative features as deviancy to the devices’ makers and operators. This lecture clears a space for considering how far the modern critique of “hidden labor” can help us understand premodern attitudes toward such contrivances as foreign idols, and how the medieval connection between deceit and foreignness, in turn, can help us further interrogate the limits and biases of modern techno-skepticism. 

When: Tuesday 17 March, 18:15-21:00
Lecture: Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building (18:15-19:45)
Reception: Roberts Building Foyer (19:45-21:00)

Workshop: Animate Instruments

The workshop will explore issues of technology, labour, and agency, with a focus on transhistorical, comparative-connected frameworks. 

When: Wednesday 18 March, 14:00-16:00
Where: Room 101, 20 Gordon Square

Open to History of Art PhD students only.

Details will be circulated via email.

Image Credit: Laughing Idol. Folio from Kitab al-Bulhan (illustrated astrological book). Iraq, ca. 1399. University of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Or. 133, fol. 37v.

Lecture 2: Frontier Talismans and the Making of Medieval Race.

This lecture makes the case for considering frontier talismans as a form of technical marvel with a long, cross-cultural history, one whose political and intellectual implications remain underexamined. As monumental, threshold structures, frontier talismans were frequently imagined in the medieval world to keep dangerous outsiders out, especially in fluctuating border zones like the Caucasus and the Iberian Peninsula. A chief example was the barrier against Gog and Magog. Depending on the source’s cultural origins, Gog and Magog were identified as Scythians, Huns, Alans, Khazars, Arabs, Turks, or Mongols. These identifications functioned to distinguish the community from its outsides, while grouping enemies into ostensibly generalizable, hierarchical categories, using cultural and somatic traits. At the same time, their discriminatory work was unstable, pointing to medieval race-making as a situated, mutable mechanism. Frontier talismans thus have the potential to illuminate the role of medieval monuments in mediating racialization as well as the inherent instability of race-craft in premodernity.

When: Thursday 19 March, 17:30-19:30
Where: G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming LT in Roberts Building

Lamia Balafrej

Lamia Balafrej is an Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, specializing in the Islamic world. Forthcoming projects include a book on technical marvels and the politics of difference in medieval Islam and an edited volume with Hannah Barker (ASU) on race and ethnicity in medieval Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Early findings appeared in articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated slaves (2022), and images of domestic slavery (2021). This research has been supported by a 2026 Berenson Fellowship at Harvard University/Villa I Tatti, a 2023 Rome Prize, and a 2023 Getty Scholar Grant. Her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (2019), examined Persian painting’s labor-intensive intricacy, prompting her interest in instrumentality. Hailing from Morocco, she is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and received her PhD from the Université Aix-Marseille.