Online Lecture: Recycled Cities: Sardis and the Fortifications of Early Byzantine Anatolia

Two Symposium Announcements (Madrid and Barcelona)

Byzantine Studies Lectures (NHRF), March 2024

The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday March 11 with a hybrid lecture on:

Silent Strengths: Unearthing the Role of Women in Digenis Akritis

Marketa Kulhankova Masaryk University

 

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_qJ-_N0JmQ6aQxadHIwBeIQ

Lecture: Inhabiting Byzantine Athens

The Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens is pleased to invite you to a lecture, “Inhabiting Byzantine Athens: Insights from the Athenian Agora Excavations Archives.”

Foteini Kondyli, University of Virginia

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

7:00pm (Greece) | 12:00pm (U.S. EST)

 

Cotsen Hall, 9 Anapiron Polemou Street, 106 76 Athens, & Online

*The lecture will be in English

 

The Inhabiting Byzantine Athens project seeks to reconstruct the topography and spatial layout of the city, alongside the living conditions and activities of its inhabitants, spanning from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries AD. Relying on the legacy data from the Athenian Agora Excavations, this talk sheds light on the lives and experiences of ordinary people in Byzantine Athens, exploring how they interacted, organized their built environment, and contributed to the city’s infrastructure and management. Central to this discussion is the examination of the biographies of their homes and neighborhoods, tracking changes in architecture, spatial layout, and usage patterns over time.

Join on Zoom

Watch on YouTube

Foteini Kondyli (Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, University of Virginia) specializes in the archaeology of the Late Antique, Byzantine, and Frankish periods bringing together archaeology, archival research, spatial analysis, and the digital humanities. She is the author of Rural Communities in Late Byzantium, Resilience and Vulnerability in the Northern Aegean (2022) and co-editor of The Byzantine Neighbourhood. Urban Space and Political Action (2022). Kondyli has conducted extensive work in numerous archaeological sites across Greece, Turkey, Albania, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Her project Inhabiting Byzantine Athens utilizes legacy data from the Athenian Agora Excavations to reconstruct socioeconomic activities, spaces, and urban experience exploring issues related to Byzantine city-making processes and the significant role of non-elites as city-makers.

 

 

 

 

Online Lecture: Political Rituals and Urban Communities in Cilician Armenia

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

Tuesday, February 27, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EST, UTC -5) | Zoom
Political Rituals and Urban Communities in Cilician Armenia
Gohar Grigoryan, University of Fribourg

Outdoor rituals were among those rare occasions when medieval rulers and ruling aristocracies could be seen in person and inspected publicly. As in many medieval societies, so also in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375), these public ceremonies were almost always performed in front of urban communities. While the political and propagandistic concerns of these aesthetic enactments come as little surprise, the present lecture will address the question from the point of view of those city inhabitants who were to contemplate—and in some cases, to partake in—the carefully organized and well-pondered rituals of the men of power.

Gohar Grigoryan
is a senior researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Department of Art History and Archaeology. She received her PhD from the same university in 2017 for her dissertation on royal images in Cilician Armenia. She is the author of many essays on medieval Armenian art and history and co-editor of three books, including, most recently, Staging the Ruler’s Body in Medieval Cultures, published by Brepols/Harvey Miller (2023).

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.

Hellenic Research Fellowship Program lecture, Feb. 21

Sent on behalf of George I. Paganelis, Curator, Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection

Dear Friends of the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection,

You are cordially invited to attend a live Zoom talk entitled “Dimitrios Moschos’ Neaira, a Greek Comedy in Renaissance Italy” on Feb. 21, 2024 by our current Hellenic Research Fellow, Dr. Stavroula Kiritsi. (The event will be recorded and archived on the Hellenic Research Fellowship Program (HRFP) page at https://library.csus.edu/tsakopoulos-hellenic-collection/hrfp.)

See the relevant event details at the following link: https://library.csus.edu/spotlight-and-events/dimitrios-moschos-neaira-greek-comedy-renaissance-italy.

 

Byzantine Studies Lectures (NHRF), February 2024

The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday February 19 with a hybrid lecture on:

Byzantine Greek: The weight of the past, the challenges of the present [in Greek]

Martin Hinterberger University of Cyprus

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_1LqgwuM6RCCQSajR3s2ijg

 

Free online Hellenic Research Fellowship Program lecture, Feb. 13

You are cordially invited to attend a live Zoom talk on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time by our current Hellenic Research Fellow, Dr. Justin Willson. The talk is entitled “Maksim Grek Between Two Worlds.” The event will be recorded and archived on the Hellenic Research Fellowship Program (HRFP) page at https://library.csus.edu/tsakopoulos-hellenic-collection/hrfp.

See the following link for full details about the event: https://library.csus.edu/spotlight-and-events/maksim-grek-between-two-worlds.

 

Online Lecture: Byzantium as Europe’s Black Mirror

Lecture: “India on the Red Sea: The Early Byzantine Awareness of East Africa and South Arabia”

India on the Red Sea: The Early Byzantine Awareness of East Africa and South Arabia

February 15, 2024, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.

Dumbarton Oaks Public Lecture with Benjamin Garstad

From the late third and early fourth centuries we find a number of Greek and Latin texts that refer to a country at the southern reaches of the Red Sea as India and its inhabitants as Indians — in regions that had once been known uniformly as Ethiopia or Arabia. This novel usage recognized the rise of the kingdom of Axum in Abyssinia, as well as Himyar, her neighbour and rival across the straits, as a major regional power and the growing importance of the Red Sea to the Roman Empire as an avenue of trade, but also as a theatre for carrying on conflicts by proxy with the old enemy, Persia. Calling them Indians distinguished the Axumites and the Himyarites from their neighbours, perhaps in terms of language and appearance, but undoubtedly in terms of politics and religious adherence. The negus in Axum and the emperor in Constantinople tended to enjoy friendly relations and the Axumites, unlike the Nilotic peoples who continued to raid the Province of Egypt, were early converts to Christianity. The designation of Abyssinians and Yemenites as Indians appears to have originated with a narrative of primeval migration from the Indus to the headwaters of the Nile, presented by Philostratus as a past-life recollection in the Life of Apollonius and integrated by Eusebius of Caesarea into his Chronicle. It thus gives us a fascinating insight into the ways that people in the late antique Mediterranean generated geographic and ethnographic knowledge and came to understand new and exotic people in the world around them.

After completing his PhD at the University of St Andrews under the supervision of Karla Pollmann and teaching and conducting research at his alma mater, the University of Calgary, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University, Benjamin Garstad began working at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, where he is currently Professor of Classics. Most of his work concentrates on the interstices of myth and history and of historiography and fiction in late antique literature. He is the editor and translator of Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse; An Alexandrian World Chronicle in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2012) and the author of Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch: Reconstructing a Lost Historian, published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2022.

Zoom registration: https://doaks-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wD4iEhuNQmm27L6ZPdPQLw#/registration

In person registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/public-lecture-in-byzantine-studies-tickets-803003574307?aff=oddtdtcreator

Caption: Waxeba (Axum), Copper, Coin (Uncertain Value), Uncertain Mint, circa 340-circa 400. Dumbarton Oaks, BZC.2009.014

Alt-text for obverse, same for reverse: Bust of a draped man facing right enclosed in a circle

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