Announcements

Call for Applications – Workshop on the Public Medieval (October 2024) at Virginia Tech

Updated on by bsanacom

The Medieval Academy of America’s jobs report from May 2023, coupled with the complementary data presented in the American Historical Association’s jobs report of September 2023, demonstrate well the (potential) grim future of medieval studies in the United States. But trends are not destiny. Students continue to fill our courses across all disciplines, and (at least anecdotally) public demand for premodern or premodern-adjacent fantasy content – films, tv, books – seems to be growing. Moreover, there’s a strong case to be made that knowing more both about the medieval world and how stories about that period have been deployed in modernity, are becoming increasingly necessary. The MAA has a moment to make that case with its Centennial, both in the earned media that will accrue to medieval studies with the celebration, and in the decentralized slate of activities across the country that will accompany the year-long event.

To that end, Virginia Tech (in partnership with the University of Virginia, and with support from a Centennial Grant from the Medieval Academy of America) is hosting a 2-day workshop in October 2024 to mentor colleagues so that they can do public-facing work. This can include, but is not limited too, planning events on their home campuses in support of the 2025 MAA Centennial celebration, positioning themselves to write pieces for newspapers and magazines, and working with other cultural institutions, among others.

Graduate students, early career researchers, and underemployed MedievALLists, are especially encouraged to apply but all scholars in any discipline working on the medieval world, broadly defined, are welcome.

The event will be held Thursday October 3 – Saturday October 5, 2024 on the campus of Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA).

DETAILS:

  • To allow for close collaboration between mentors and participants, spaces are limited to 15 participants.
  • All participants will receive a $750 stipend to defray travel and lodging. Food will be provided at the event itself.
  • Topics covered will include considerations on doing public writing and event planning from experienced mentors. Time will also be dedicated to workshopping an idea in a small group, and in collaboration with a dedicated mentor (see below).

MENTORS:

Please apply here.

To apply, you’ll be required to submit a current CV, as well as a statement about what proposed public-facing work you’d be interested in doing in the coming year. Applications are due no later than 11:59pm on May 1, 2024.  Accepted participants will be notified on around June 1, 2024.

See more at www.publicmedieval.org. Please share widely and direct any questions to the organizer, Prof. Matthew Gabriele (gabriele@vt.edu).

Cotsen Textile Traces Talk: From Smuggled Silkworms to Silk Empire

Updated on by bsanacom

The George Washington University’s Byzantine Studies Club, hosted by the Cotsen Center at the Textile Museum, invites you to join them for Silk in Byzantium. Lead researcher Jenny Lowery ‘24 and several other Byzantine Studies Club students have assembled a micro exhibit telling the story of silk in Byzantium, the first such undergraduate exhibit at the Textile Museum. This talk will explore the origins of the native Byzantine silk trade from its covert beginnings to its influence on the greater luxuries market in Constantinople and beyond.

Join online or in person Thursday May 2 at 1pm EDT, registering for either option at this link: https://museum.gwu.edu/cotsen-textile-traces-talk-smuggled-silkworms-silk-empire

Mentorship Program for East-Central European Scholars

Updated on by bsanacom

Invitation for Submissions: Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting, March 20-22 2025

Updated on by bsanacom

Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting

March 20-22 2025

Invitation for Submissions

In March 2025, the Medieval Academy of America will hold its centennial meeting on the campus of Harvard University. This three-day conference, organized by members of Harvard’s Standing Committee on Medieval Studies and scholars from colleges and universities across the Boston area, will be preceded on Wednesday 19 March by a day-long graduate student workshop as well as the annual Digital Medieval Studies Institute (DMSI). The conference is meant not simply to celebrate the centenary of a professional organization, but to reflect on the present and future of the study of the “medieval” millennium of the human past, broadly conceived, and to welcome scholars and students working on this period who belong to professional organizations other than the Medieval Academy. We thus would be grateful if you could circulate the attached CFP to your membership, and encourage them to submit individual paper or panel proposals before 3 June 2024.  The CFP and links to submission forms are available online here. Note that we expect to offer travel subventions worth $500 to as many as 100 colleagues lacking research support, whose papers are accepted or who are chosen to participate in the graduate student workshop.

 

Sean Gilsdorf and Eileen Sweeney, MAA 2025 Program Committee Co-chairs

Nicholas Watson, MAA 2025 Local Events Committee Chair

Fwd: Gennadius Library Workshop “Orthodoxy and the Ottoman World Around It: Cultural and Intellectual Connections, 1657-1861”

Posted on by bsanacom

The Gennadius Library is organizing a workshop convened by Dr. Yusuf Ziya Karabicak, Constantine and George Macricostas Fellow 2023-2024 at the Gennadius Library, on Tuesday April 23, 2024 in Cotsen Hall from 10 am to 8pm (and online).

The workshop entitled “Orthodoxy and the Ottoman World Around It: Cultural and Intellectual Connections, 1657-1861” brings together ten scholars who focus on neglected aspects of the relationship between actors around the Orthodox Church and the Ottoman government. The focus is on the cultural and intellectual connections, material ties, everyday relations, and shared frameworks for understanding the politics that created influences which went both ways. For more information click here.

Call for Sessions: Mary Jaharis Center Sponsored Panel, 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Updated on by bsanacom

To encourage the integration of Byzantine studies within the scholarly community and medieval studies in particular, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for a Mary Jaharis Center sponsored session at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 8–10, 2024. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.

Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website. The deadline for submission is May 13, 2024.

If the proposed session is approved, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse a maximum of 4 session participants (presenters and moderator) up to $800 maximum for scholars traveling from North America and up to $1400 maximum for those traveling from outside North America. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided.

For further details and submission instructions, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/60th-icms.

Contact Brandie Ratliff, Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture, with any questions.

Online Lecture: A Republic of Letters in Verse? Syriac Poems Addressed to Individuals and Communities

Posted on by bsanacom
The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the final lecture in the 2023–2024 East of Byzantium lecture series.


Tuesday, April 23, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EDT, UTC -4) | Zoom
A Republic of Letters in Verse? Syriac Poems Addressed to Individuals and Communities (9th to 13th Centuries)
Salam Rassi, University of Edinburgh

Poetry has long been recognised as a key genre in Syriac literature. The metrical homily is among the earliest sites of theological exposition in the Syriac tradition. My paper will trace developments in Syriac poetry between the 9th and 13th centuries to understand how the genre evolved into a form of scholarly exchange within and across the Syriac churches. I argue that Syriac poetry often functioned as an elite means of communication. In addition to being an important vehicle for ideas, the genre opens a window onto the intellectual and cultural milieus of its authors and other educated members of their communities.

Salam Rassi is Lecturer of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His main area of research is Christian-Muslim interactions across theology, philosophy, and literature. Following the completion of his doctorate at the University of Oxford, he became a Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the American University of Beirut. He has also worked as a cataloguer of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts at the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Minnesota and was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford. His first book, entitled Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World, was published by Oxford University Press in early 2022.

Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.

Byzantine Studies Lectures (NHRF), April 2024

Updated on by bsanacom

The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday April 22 with a hybrid lecture on:

Byzantine Medicine in Light of the Global Middle Ages: Current Trends and Future Avenues

 Petros Bouras–Vallianatos National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

18:00 EET, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, V. Constantinou Av. 11635, Athens.

To join via Zoom please follow the link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8yzZ0I3jT1a96KDpwymxFg

CFP Workshop LMU 22-23 November 2024

Updated on by bsanacom

In memoriam: Harry J. Magoulias

Updated on by bsanacom

In memory of Harry J. Magoulias

March 25, 2024

This obituary was published on the Wayne State University History Department website.

Harry J. Magoulias, professor emeritus of Wayne State University, Detroit Michigan, passed away peacefully at home in Del Mar, California on Feb. 19, 2024.

Magoulias taught in the history department from 1965 to 1990. As a specialist in Byzantine history, he was one of the first scholars trained in the U.S. to publish an overview of the empire and its civilization, “Byzantine Christianity: Emperor, Church and the West” (1970). His subsequent publications were annotated translations of key witnesses to the conquest of Constantinople in the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. His “Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks” (1975), the translation of Doukas’ “Historia Turco-Byzantina,” made a uniquely valuable account of the events leading up to and succeeding the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 available to an Anglophone readership. Similarly, the single most important eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade, “O City of Byzantium” (1984), made the capacious annals of Niketas Choniates accessible to a wider readership, thereby stimulating a more complex and nuanced understanding of relations between Byzantium and the Latin West. Additionally, he published thirteen articles that are listed on his page at the website Academia.edu.

In his later years, Magoulias published a book of short stories, “I Tell You What Love Is” (1993), which captures colorful vignettes of the Greek-American experience of his past generation.

Magoulias was born in Baltimore, MD in 1925, to parents who had emigrated from the Sparta, Lakonia region of Greece. His father was a Greek Orthodox priest, which proved decisive in the career trajectory of his son.

As a result, Magoulias was directed to the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he was ordained a priest. There his interest in Byzantine theology and culture was awakened, and while serving as a parish priest in Detroit in the 1950s, he started taking classes at Wayne State University, where he received his B.A. and M.A. degrees. A promising student, his professors persuaded him to pursue a Ph.D., and with their support, he received a full scholarship to Harvard, and was subsequently a research fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, where he completed his Ph.D. thesis, “The Lives of the Saints as Sources of Data for Sixth and Seventh Century Byzantine Social and Economic History” (1961).

In addition to his scholarship as a noted Byzantinist, he was pivotal in designing the Byzantine mosaics and stained glass windows of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St. Paul in Hempstead, Long Island, where his brother was the priest. Completed in 1979, the new artwork inaugurated an interest in decorating American Orthodox churches with authentic Byzantine iconography. The highlight of the work of St. Paul’s is a remarkable mosaic rendering of the Anastasis fresco from the Church of Chora in present-day Istanbul.

Professor Magoulias is survived by his wife, Ariadne, sons, Konstantin and Michael and grandchildren Maximus, Marcus, Genevieve and Harry, as well as nieces and nephews.

© 2024 Byzantine Studies Association of North America, Inc. (BSANA) . All Rights Reserved.