ASCSA NEH Fellowships, October Deadline

Updated on September 3, 2024 by bsanacom

ASCSA National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowships

The NEH Fellowship funds postdoctoral and advanced research in all humanities fields supported by its mission and resources.

Deadline: October 31, 2024

Eligibility: Postdoctoral scholars and professionals in all fields relevant to the mission of the ASCSA who are U.S. citizens or foreign nationals residing in the U.S. Foreign nationals must have lived in the U.S. for at least the three years immediately preceding the application deadline. Applicants must already hold their Ph.D. or have completed all requirements, except for the actual conferral of the degree, by the application deadline.

Terms: Two to four fellows will be selected for awards of 4, 5, or 9 months duration. The monthly stipend per fellow is $5,000 allocated from a total pool of $90,000 per year. School fees are waived, and the award provides lunches at Loring Hall five days per week. The NEH Fellow can use the stipend for travel costs, housing, residence permit, and other living expenses. NEH Fellows should use the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as their primary research base, but research may be carried out throughout Greece. The fellowships may not be held remotely.

For more information and how to apply click here.

—
American School of Classical Studies at Athens
321 Wall Street
Princeton, NJ 08540-1515
Email: programs@ascsa.org
Website: https://www.ascsa.edu.gr

In Memoriam: Carol Downer

Updated on September 3, 2024 by bsanacom

Sent on behalf of Betsy Bolman and Richard Downer:

To commemorate Dr. Carol Downer († 2021), her husband Richard Downer has very kindly offered information about the availability of her doctoral thesis. The study relates to the martyrdom of St. Pteleme (Pierpont Morgan Coptic Manuscript M581), and is an edition, translation and commentary, which she completed through UCL Institute of Archaeology in Gordon Square in London. Thanks to Head Librarian of the Institute’s Library, Dr Katie Meheux, Carol Downer’s Thesis is now fully available for reading or downloading through UCL Discovery Link. The image of Martyrdom of St. Pteleme from the frontispiece on page 3 can be viewed via the Morgan Library. In the future, the thesis will also be available via the British Library’s EThOS thesis database.

Richard also notes that in addition to the accomplishments mentioned in the formal obituary, Carol also studied Aramaic, Akkadian and Hebrew. She also had some facility with Arabic. In terms of Classics, Latin and Greek were her mainstays and to this must be added Archaeology and Classical Philosophy. She also taught on the theory of language and its development.

____

The following memorial was Compiled for the Dept of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London by: Joan Taylor, Professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism in the
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London (5 March 2021):

“We are very sorry to learn that Carol Downer, long-standing Honorary Research Fellow in the department, died on Saturday, 27 February in Lincoln County Hospital, after weeks of treatment following her emergency admission on January 14th.

Carol was a brilliant linguist with a wealth of knowledge about early Christianity, particularly ancient eastern traditions. She led the Coptic language group and was a founding member of the Advanced Greek Reading group in the department. Carol had an exceptional knowledge and experience of eastern Christianity and was a renowned expert in Coptic Studies.

Given her father’s role in the RAF, Carol’s childhood provided the opportunity of living in Aden (Yemen), and that environment seems to have made a lasting impression on her. At Oakdene School, Beaconsfield, where she was Head Girl, she was able to delve into antiquity and learn Latin and Greek. She then read Classics, with Ancient History and International Law at Edinburgh University. After her PGCE, she taught English, and again left England to work at Berber Girls’ Secondary School, Northern Sudan, on a Voluntary Service Overseas placement. She then taught Classics, and was from 1977-91 head of the Classics Department at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith.

She studied Egyptology at UCL (MA 1992) with a dissertation on patterns of monastic life in Egypt from the 3rd to 5th centuries. At UCL she expanded her languages to Coptic, Syriac, Middle Egyptian, Hieratic and Demotic. While in earlier years, her researches in Egyptology focussed on the role of the camel in the ancient world. Her PhD at UCL (2004) was on the Martyrdom of St. Pteleme (as found in Pierpont Morgan Coptic Manuscript M581). She has translated and written on other little known ancient Christian texts, and produced the Coptic translations for Roger Pearse’s 2010 edition of Eusebius’ Quaestiones ad Stephanum et ad Marinum, entitled Eusebius of Caesarea: Gospel Problems and Solutions (Chieftain Publishing: Ipswich).

Carol’s association with King’s began already in the early 1990s when she taught Greek and Latin. She also taught at Surrey University, Birkbeck, UCL and elsewhere, ran language courses in Summer School programmes, and also generously taught students privately whenever language needs arose. Her passion for languages has encouraged many others to learn, many of whom have become eminent academics. She was highly esteemed as a Coptic specialist, and visited a number of Coptic monasteries in Egypt, with her husband Richard.

Carol was deeply committed to her faith as member of Melkite Greek Catholic Church, based on the Syrian/Byzantine tradition, with its Patriarchal Cathedral situated just off the Street called Straight in Damascus, a commitment that she shared with her husband Richard, who is deacon of the same Church. As a deacon’s wife she was referred to as Diakonissa Carol.

She was a keen and energetic cyclist, and in recent years commuted from Lincolnshire by train and by bike to lead her Coptic Language Group, and participate in Biblical Studies seminars and the Advanced Greek Reading Group, in fair weather or foul.

She will be greatly missed.”

In Memoriam: Maria Panayotidi

Updated on September 3, 2024 by bsanacom

Please see below a note from Nancy Sevcenco commemorating Maria Panayotidi, as well as the formal obituary circulated by the Christian Archaeological Society of Athens.

Maria Panayotidi, emerita professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology at the University of Athens. An archaeologist on Kos and on Mount Sinai, as well as a wide-ranging and prolific scholar of Byzantine wall painting, she was a regular speaker at Byzantine conferences, and for those of us who made frequent trips to Greece, she was a welcoming presence and an especially gracious and generous colleague. An active member of the Christian Archaeological Society and its journal Deltion, she was also instrumental in the revival of the Commission for the History of Byzantine art of the AIEB. She spent academic terms in this country at Dumbarton Oaks, at Princeton and Stanford universities, and elsewhere.

An obituary published by the Christian Archaeological Society in Athens has been kindly translated into English by her longtime friend and collaborator, Nicholas Melvani and is available below and attached:

ΧΡΙΣΤΙΑΝΙΚΗ ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΚΗ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑ
CHRISTIAN ARCHAEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
ACADEMIC SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF BYZANTINE
AND POST-BYZANTINE ARCHAEOLOGY AND ART, FOUNDED 1884

OBITUARY FOR MARIA PANAYOTIDI
†19 July 2024

“The Christian Archaeological Society announces with deep sadness and sorrow to its members and friends the death of Maria-Aphrodite Panayotidi-Kessisoglou on 19 July 2024. Maria Panayotidi was professor emerita of Byzantine Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, a member of the Christian Archaeological Society since 1970 and honorary chairwoman of the Administrative Board of our Society, a life member of the Archaeological Society at Athens and a member, among others, of the Greek Committee and the Commission for the History of Byzantine Art of the International Association of Byzantine Studies.

Maria Panayotidi was born in Athens to a family with a refugee background originating from Smyrna. She studied archaeology at the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She then pursued her doctoral studies in Paris as a student of André Grabar. In 1969 she submitted her doctoral dissertation on the subject «Les monuments de Grèce depuis la fin de la crise iconoclaste jusqu’à l’an mille», which later, in 1986, led to the publication of her seminal article titled «La peinture monumentale en Grèce de la période post-iconoclaste jusqu’à l’avènement des Comnènes (843-1081)» in the Cahiers Archéologiques (volume 34, p. 75-108).

Returning to Greece she was appointed initially as academic assistant at the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and later at the chair of Byzantine Archaeology and Art of the NKUA where she began her teaching career. Following the framework law of 1982 regarding higher education, she was promoted to all ranks of the university hierarchy and in 1999 was appointed full professor. In 2008 she retired from the University as professor emerita. Teaching and interaction with her students were among her natural talents; for many of us this relationship was not interrupted after graduation but continued for life. Her classes concentrated on architecture and painting of the Middle Byzantine period, but also on other fields, such as sculpture, the art of Georgia, Cappadocia and others.

Aside from teaching, Maria Panayotidi was always engaged in archaeological fieldwork. When she was appointed at the University of Athens, she joined the research group for recording the Byzantine and post-Byzantine monuments of the Mani and of Epidavros Limira (1974-1983) under the leadership of Professor Nikolaos Drandakis. Later, together with her loyal friend and collaborator professor emerita Sofia Kalopissi-Verti, they were in charge of the university excavation of the Early Christian settlement at the sanctuary of Apollo at Kardamaina (ancient Alasarna) on Kos from 1985 and from 1998 of the excavation of the basilica of the Holy Summit on Mount Sinai, where cohorts of young students were trained and from where experienced archaeologists and byzantinists emerged who are now eminent members of the Archaeological Service, of Universities, and of Research Centers.

With her teaching, fieldwork, and personality, she succeeded in revealing to a multitude of students the importance and contribution of Byzantine civilization to World Art and to Hellenism and in guiding them through the fascinating trails of Byzantine art. She successfully supervised and co-supervised a great number of post-graduate theses and doctoral dissertations, in addition to countless seminar papers. Her approach to the monuments and their study, as well as to their promotion, was holistic, as is evident in her activity as director and teacher, even after her retirement, at the Inter-University Program of Postgraduate Studies: “Management of Monuments: Archaeology, City, and Architecture”. This interdisciplinary seminar served as a hospitable platform for scholars specializing in the topic to share their knowledge and experience.

Her numerous studies and edited works consistently form the basis of any publication on the study of monumental, primarily, Byzantine painting and of the social and cultural environment of patrons and painters in Greece, as well as in Cyprus (https://uoa.academia.edu/MariaPanayotidi).

A monumental work of hers, from both the scholarly and editorial points of view, is the (decalingual) Multilingual Illustrated Dictionary of Byzantine Architecture and Sculpture Terminology, Crete University Press, Heraklion 2010 (recipient of the Academy of Athens award) which she compiled together with professor emerita Sofia Kalopissi-Verti and in collaboration with colleagues from other countries, a valuable tool that offers solutions to all the problems of terminology that emerge when writing a study.

Maria Panayotidi served for several years on the collective bodies of the Ministry of Culture (the Central Archaeological Council, Regional Museum Councils), and persistently supported the protection and scientific promotion of the monuments within their social framework, guided by the principles of heritage protection that demand the preservation of the monuments for the next generations, her children, as she used to call her beloved students who now hold responsible positions.

Her contribution to the Christian Archaeological Society is characterized by this spirit. She was elected a member of the Administrative Board in 1994 and served the Society as vice-president (2000-2002), treasurer (2007-2010), secretary general (2010-2018), and president (2018-2021). For her contribution to the accomplishment of the Society’s goals she was unanimously awarded the title of honorary president of the Christian Archaeological Society in 2021.

She generously offered her knowledge, experience, and time and contributed, in collaboration with the other members of the Administrative Board, to the better organization and operation of the Christian Archaeological Society, to the further flourishing of the Deltion of the Christian Archaeological Society (Deltion ChAE), to the expansion of its publications with the addition of external collaborations, to securing funds for publications, to the establishment of awards for the best publications; as a result, the Administrative Board became the scientific evaluator of analogous activities and initiatives of their sponsors.

She was an active member of the Organizing Committee of the annual Symposia, as well as of the editorial committee of the Deltion ChAE; as a result, these two activities of the Society became established among the most important events of the scholarly community of Byzantine studies in Greece and acquired an international appeal.

She was a pioneer in the dissemination of Byzantine and post-Byzantine archaeology to society with the organization of the famous archaeological – educational trips with demanding and often exhausting schedules. Concurrently, the Society was always present in informing the scholarly and general public on subjects related to the protection of the monuments and she did not hesitate to offer her scientific knowledge and to undertake with youthful and at the same time logical vigor campaigns to salvage endangered monuments, sometimes with unpleasant consequences on her personal life.

For her contribution to scholarship and for her teaching, as well as for her genuine kindness, her commitment to her goals, her unselfish generosity and her hard work, her sublime and elegant presence, her sweet eloquence, her steadfast and uncompromising perseverance in her visions, we will always remember her with feelings of noble admiration and guileless emulation, as we strive to follow the trail she taught us in the university classrooms and from the important responsible positions she held and served with integrity and unsurpassable virtue.

The funeral service of Maria Panayotidi was held on Thursday 25 July 2024, 11:00 at the First Cemetery of Athens.”

Kindly translated by Dr Nicholas Melvani

Studying East of Byzantium XI: Ritual

Updated on September 3, 2024 by bsanacom

The Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross in Brookline, MA, are pleased to invite abstracts for the next Studying East of Byzantium workshop: Studying East of Byzantium XI: Ritual.

Studying East of Byzantium XI: Ritual is a three-part workshop that intends to bring together doctoral students and very recent PhDs studying the Christian East to reflect on how to reflect on the usefulness of the concept of “Ritual” in studying the Christian East, to share methodologies, and to discuss their research with workshop respondents, Emma Loosley Leeming, University of Exeter, and Lev Weitz, The Catholic University of America. The workshop will meet on November 18, 2024, February 14, 2025, and June 5–6, 2025, on Zoom. The timing of the workshop meetings will be determined when the participant list is finalized.

We invite all graduate students and recent PhDs working in the Christian East whose work considers, or hopes to consider, the theme of ritual in their own research to apply.

Participation is limited to 10 students. The full workshop description is available on the East of Byzantium website (https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/studying-east-of-byzantium-xi-ritual/). Those interested in attending should submit a C.V. and 200-word abstract through the East of Byzantium website no later than September 23, 2024.

For questions, please contact East of Byzantium organizers, Christina Maranci, Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Harvard University, and Brandie Ratliff, Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at contact@eastofbyzantium.org.

EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture at Hellenic College Holy Cross in Brookline, MA. It explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire in the late antique and medieval periods.

BSC 2024 preliminary program and hotel information

Updated on August 27, 2024 by bsanacom

The preliminary program for the 50th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference, 24–27 October 2024 in New York City is now available. (Click here to download a PDF of the preliminary program). The conference website should be live by next week, but in the meantime the details for blocked lodging are below. Both hotels are in the vicinity of Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus, which is where the conference will be held on Saturday and Sunday.

Empire Hotel (rooms must be booked by 9/20/24): Empire Hotel Reservation Link
Fairfield Inn (rooms must be booked by 9/24/24): Fairfield Inn Reservation Link

Please let Nathanael Aschenbrenner (2024 BSC Program Committee Chair) know (naschenbrenner@bard.edu) if there are any issues with the program (especially names, affiliations, and titles). Also make sure that your BSANA membership is up-to-date!

Call for chairs: If you are interested in chairing a session (see the openings on the program, highlighted in yellow), please let Nathanael Aschenbrenner know your preferred session(s) and he will add you to the program.

CFP: Judeo-Greek across the Centuries: Tracing Greek-speaking Jews

Updated on August 27, 2024 by bsanacom

60^th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 8-10, 2025

Judeo-Greek across the Centuries: Tracing Greek-speaking Jews

Organizer: Michail Kitsos, Tel Aviv University

Papers are sought for the session, Judeo-Greek across the Centuries: Tracing Greek-speaking Jews, to be proposed for the 60^th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 8-10, 2025), organized by Michail Kitsos (Tel Aviv University)

From the Septuagint and the Jewish inscriptions found in the Helladic area and the broader Hellenic world to the Jewish Apocrypha composed in Greek and the Judeo-Greek fragments from the Cairo Geniza, Judeo-Greek language shows prominence and endurance. Yet, the language of these written sources is hardly acknowledged as Judeo-Greek, rather only as Greek. The two sessions aim to demonstrate the need to acknowledge Judeo-Greek as a linguistic medium that defined the literary production of Greek-speaking Jews and to scrutinize it as a Jewish phenomenon that expressed Greek Jewishness and Jewishness in the Greek language.

How could our perception of Jewish literature written in Greek change if we acknowledge the linguistic medium as Judeo-Greek? Or, what can we say about the Greek of Jews and their literatures vis-à-vis the Greek of Christians and their respective works? The session aims to explore these questions as well as questions pertaining to the production of Jewish literature in Judeo-Greek from the third century BCE to the fifteenth century CE and the literary and linguistic associations between the Judeo-Greek in the works of the Greek-speaking Jews and the Greek in the works of Greek-speaking Christians.

To submit a paper proposal, you are kindly requested to do so no later than September 15, 2024 using this link: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=5882.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizer at michailk@tauex.tau.ac.il

Inaugural Conference of the Orthodox Canon Law Society of North America

Updated on August 27, 2024 by bsanacom

Registration is open now for the inaugural conference of the Orthodox Canon Law Society of North America (https://www.oclsna.org/conference) on October 18 and 19 at the Maliotis Cultural Center, on the grounds of Hellenic College Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, 50 Goddard Ave., Brookline, MA. The conference program and abstracts are available on the Society’s website. The abstracts for the conference (which you can read on the Society’s website) demonstrate the quality of their scholarship and offer a glimpse into just how interesting this multidisciplinary field can be. The seventeen papers include such diverse subjects as an oral history of the Rastafari’s entrance into Ethiopian Orthodoxy, a canonical analysis of cross-dressing saints in Byzantium, the Armenian canons on divorce, and a proposal for the ordination of the disabled. The Orthodox Christian Attorney Network has partnered with Society and is sponsoring the luncheon program on the confidentiality of Orthodox confession and its implications in civil litigation. The Society is an incorporated non-profit academic society that is Pan-Orthodox as well as unrestricted in denominational affiliation. All are invited to register early and take advantage of lower flight and accommodation costs.

The conference provides a venue for the presentation of papers embodying current research on all aspects of Orthodox canonical studies and for discussion of canonical praxis in a professional setting. Orthodox canon law includes the entire field of Eastern Christian canonical history and practice, including the Oriental and Eastern Catholic traditions. The discipline extends beyond the review of formal legislation and includes a vast scope of practice and literature. The canonical and legal life of the Church is reflected in such diverse areas as hagiography, liturgy, art, hymnography, and pastoral practice.

CFP: Call for Papers: Radicalism and its Uses in Late Roman/Byzantine History

Updated on August 27, 2024 by bsanacom

Call for Papers: Radicalism and its Uses in Late Roman/Byzantine History (Session for the Leeds International Medieval Congress, 7–10 July 2025)

Radicalism, as a form of sociopolitical thought or action that aims at fully upturning the roots (radices) of a problem, must necessarily pose some threat to the status quo. The late Roman and/or Byzantine status quo is generally regarded to have been particularly impervious to such threats. One dominant narrative of Christianisation is that the ‘oppositional radicalism of the early church’, especially the radical potential of its social ethics, was defused in the rapprochement with mainstream Roman society and gave way to a non-radical ‘establishment outlook’ (Harper 2016, 141). This was, for some, unavoidable: ‘as Christianity was progressively identified with the Empire’, Christian ideas ‘gradually lost their radical character’ (Merianos & Gotsis 2017, 205). For others, it was a conscious counter-radical project, as ‘upper-class Christian leaders’ learned ‘to accommodate the Bible’s most radical social critiques… into something less threatening’ (Maxwell 2021, 158). Either way, the consequence is a model of Christian Roman society that affords little space for radicalism, even at the margins, over a thousand-year period.

This model is under challenge. The editors of the 2018 Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium criticise the field’s ‘persistent tendency… to subordinate individuals to normative ideas’ and to assume that late Romans ‘could not conceive a particular radical, heterodox, or supposedly modern idea because they could not think outside the box of their imperial-Orthodox framework’ (Kaldellis & Siniossoglou 2017, 18). “Radicalism” is one lens through which historians might meet this call for more generous study of the non-conformist elements of late Roman/Byzantine intellectual and political culture. Yet while our overarching scholarly narratives of late Roman history are just beginning to admit the possibility of “radicalism”, the terms “radical” and “radicals” have always appealed to any historian who wishes to emphasise moments of difference or divergence. We hear, for example, of the ‘radical Christian ascetics’ (Cullhed 2016, 352) who made a ‘radical rejection of normal life’ (Hezser 2018, 20), though their movements perhaps safely diverted the more threatening anti-wealth instincts of some Christians. We hear of ‘religious radicals’ (de Wet 2018, 74) and ‘guerilla… radical[s]’ (Drake 2002, 229) who made use of violence to advance their cause. We even hear of radical emperors pursuing ‘radical administrative reform’ (Bell, 2013, 165). And the late Roman past, whatever radical ideas it gave rise to itself, is productive ground for public-facing historians who think through inequality and capitalism, perhaps with a radical instinct of their own (e.g. Paolo Tedesco in Jacobin). For a society traditionally thought to have been un- or counter-radical to its core, its modern historians are eager to make claims for the radicalism of their chosen subjects.

In light of the above, the session organiser invites proposals for ambitious papers that critically interrogate the concept(s) and historiographical uses of “radicalism”, and seek to furnish the term with a sharper analytical utility. Papers may treat any aspect of late Roman or Byzantine history, conceived very broadly in time and space. They might explore any or more of the following:

The definition(s) of radicalism in different late Roman/Byzantine contexts: what was “radical” in the late Roman or Byzantine world?
Case studies of specific late Roman/Byzantine ideas and behaviour that are usefully described as, or were perceived at the time as, radical (or counter-radical);
Late Roman/Byzantine attitudes to radicalism (philosophical, social, political, religious, etc.);
Radical or counter-radical traditions of thought and/or action in the late Roman/Byzantine world;
The conceptual utility of the terms “radical” and/or “counter-radical” for understanding aspects of the late Roman/Byzantine world;
Previous scholarly uses of (or choices not to use) the term “radical” in a late Roman/Byzantine context that might be productively rethought;
Radical approaches to the study of late Roman/Byzantine history.

Scholars of any career stage are welcome to propose a paper. To do so, please send a title and brief description of the paper, around 100 words in length, to matthew.hassall@liverpool.ac.uk by the end of Friday 20 September 2024. Questions are welcome at the same address. The organiser expects to be able to defray some of the costs of participating in the Congress for any speakers who do not have their own recourse to sufficient institutional funds.

Mary Jaharis Center Sponsored Panel, 2025 International Medieval Congress

Updated on August 23, 2024 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 2024 International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 7–10, 2025. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.

The thematic strand for the 2025 IMC is “Worlds of Learning.” See the IMC Call for Papers (https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2025/) for additional information about the theme and suggested areas of discussion.

Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website (https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/imc-2025). The deadline for submission is September 9, 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 participants traveling from within Europe and up to $1400 maximum for those coming from outside Europe. Funding is through reimbursement only; advance funding cannot be provided. Eligible expenses include conference registration, transportation, and food and lodging. Receipts are required for reimbursement. Participants must participate in the conference in-person to receive funding. The Mary Jaharis Center regrets that it cannot reimburse participants who have last-minute cancellations and are unable to attend the conference.

For further details and submission instructions, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/imc-2025.

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

Dumbarton Oaks Graduate Student Museum Study Day

Updated on August 22, 2024 by bsanacom

Dumbarton Oaks Graduate Student Museum Study Day

In conjunction with an ongoing project into the composition of Byzantine silver, participants will consider silver coins, plate, and liturgical objects from the late antique and medieval Mediterranean.

Silver: Uses, Production, and Circulation in Byzantium and Beyond

Friday, October 18, 2024 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

Applications due: August 30, 2024

In conjunction with an ongoing project into the composition of Byzantine silver, the 2024 Dumbarton Oaks Museum Graduate Study Day Silver: Uses, Production, and Circulation in Byzantium and Beyond will consider silver coins, plate, and liturgical objects from the late antique and medieval Mediterranean.

The workshop will be co-taught by Jonathan Shea (Dumbarton Oaks), Ivan Marić (Dumbarton Oaks), and Elizabeth Dospel Williams (Museum of Fine Art, Boston), who will discuss the use and production of silver, its place as a material in Byzantine art and numismatics, its circulation, and the results of materials analysis on early and middle Byzantine silver coins.

In the morning, these scholars will present their current research and tour the Dumbarton Oaks galleries with students. After lunch, participants will spend the afternoon studying silver objects from the Dumbarton Oaks Collection in object storage.

Funding

Dumbarton Oaks will reserve participants’ accommodation in its on-site Guest House for one night (October 17) and will arrange for Friday lunch in the Refectory. Participants should book their own travel to Washington, to be reimbursed up to $600 upon submission of receipts.

Applications
Currently enrolled graduate students in good standing are eligible to apply. Dumbarton Oaks does not sponsor J1 visas for Study Day attendees. We encourage applicants from graduate programs in art history, archaeology, history, classics, religious studies, and other fields who might benefit from close engagement with our collections and from training in material culture approaches.

To apply, please submit a CV and cover letter with a brief summary of the candidate’s research interests, plans for future research, and an explanation of why attendance is important to the candidate’s intellectual and professional development.

All materials should be submitted as one pdf to museum@doaks.org.

Applications are due August 30, 2024.