We invite proposals for the session CIHA202400192 Matter, Materiality and Pilgrimage in Pre-Modern Times: Production, Staging and Reception” at CIHA (Lyon, France, 23-28 June 2024).
We invite proposals for the session CIHA202400192 Matter, Materiality and Pilgrimage in Pre-Modern Times: Production, Staging and Reception” at CIHA (Lyon, France, 23-28 June 2024).
Save the Date for the next Index of Medieval Art conference “Whose East?” taking place in Princeton, November 11, 2023.
Please advertise this Save the Date and circulate it to colleagues and research students who might be interested.
See the Index of Medieval Art event page for more details.
Religion and Material Culture in Late Antiquity, April 25-27, 2023
The Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions (SAMR) is hosting a zoom flash conference discussing evidence for and methodological issues in the study of materiality and late antique religion.
Schedule:
Tuesday, April 25, 6:00 pm Eastern Time
The Space of a Stylite: Columns and their Topographical Contexts,
Dina Boero (The College of New Jersey)
Wednesday, April 26, 6:00 pm Eastern Time
Desire in the Archive: A 1934 Excavation in Antioch’s Southeastern Nekropolis,
Sarah Porter (Gonzaga University)
Thursday, April 27, 6:00 pm Eastern Time
Animating Attachments: An Affective Archaeology of Late Antique Monastic Refectories,
Camille Angelo (Yale University)
For more information and to sign up: https://www.samreligions.
Following the online meeting of the Organizing Committee of the 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies -Vienna 2026 with the members of the AIEB Bureau on 16 March 2023, we would like to inform you about the preliminary profile and structure of the Congress program and to appeal to all National Committees to send us their proposals for Round Tables by 31 December 2023. The call for Free Communications will be sent in spring 2025. You may find below the main theme of the Congress, the themes of six Plenary Sessions, as well as the timetable and procedures for Round Tables, to be confirmed and approved at the Inter Congress meeting in Athens on 12 April 2024.
INFORMATION ON THE PROFILE AND STRUCTURE OF THE 25th CONGRESS OF BYZANTINE STUDIES- Vienna 2026
Date:
The 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies will be held on 24 to 29 August 2026 in Vienna, Austria.
Main Theme:
“Byzantium beyond Byzantium”, “Byzance au-delà de Byzance”, “Το Βυζάντιο πέρα από το Βυζάντιο”
General Rule:
Scholars can participate in no more than two sessions throughout the Congress. (i.e., as speaker in two sessions, or as speaker in one session plus as convener, or as convener in two sessions).
Plenary Sessions:
There will be six Plenary Sessions. The list of Plenary Session themes and speakers will be approved at the Inter-Congress meeting in Athens on 12 April 2024. National Committees will be informed about the details shortly before the meeting. The themes for Plenary Sessions are:
Round Tables:
General rules
Vienna, March 2023
The Organizing Committee
We invite you to the Fourth International Conference on Byzantine and Medieval Studies, organized by the Byzantinist Society of Cyprus (Βυζαντινολογική Εταιρεία Κύπρου), in the Nicosia Multipurpose Municipal Center (Πολυδύναμο Δημοτικό Κέντρο Λευκωσίας), between the 17th and 19th of March 2023.
Academics, researchers, and post-graduate students will present their ongoing research, work-in-progress or fieldwork reports on aspects of
the history, archaeology, art, architecture, literature, philosophy and religion of Cyprus and the broader Mediterranean region, during the Byzantine, Medieval and Ottoman periods.
The Conference is dedicated to the memory of the Society’s founding member Dr Athanasios Papageorghiou. His work – an invaluable legacy for
Cypriot and Byzantine studies – will be presented by Dr Chalarambos Bakirtzis, on Friday, 17 March, at 18:15.
The Conference keynote speaker is Professor Emeritus Asher Ovadiah – Tel Aviv University. The keynote lecture, titled: The images of the Early
Byzantine church and its architectural elements in the mirror of patristic literary sources, will be on Friday, 17 March, at 18:30.
The Honorary President of the Conference is Professor Emeritus Costas N. Constantinides – University of Ioannina. His lecture, titled: Ελληνική
παιδεία: από τη σύγκρουση στη συμφιλίωση και την αρμονική συνύπαρξη με τη χριστιανική θρησκεία, will be on Saturday, 18 March, at 10:15.
Sincerely,
Byzantinist Society of Cyprus Executive Committee
As part of its ongoing commitment to Byzantine studies, the Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture seeks proposals for a Mary Jaharis Center sponsored session at the 49th Annual Byzantine Studies Conference to be held at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, October 26–29, 2023. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.
The conference will be in-person only.
Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website. The deadline for submission is April 3, 2023.
If the proposed session is accepted, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse a maximum of 5 session participants (presenters and chair) up to $800 maximum for scholars based in North America and up to $1400 maximum for those coming from outside North America. 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/
Please contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
We are delighted to announce that registration for the Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 25th Annual International Graduate Conference for the 24th – 25th February ‘Passing Judgement: Distinctions, Separations, and Contradictions’ is now open!
Please use the links below to register for in person attendance (at the History Faculty, George Street OX12BE) or online. All papers will be delivered in-person, with the proceedings broadcast on a Zoom link that will circulate via email. We are greatly indebted to our sponsors and co-organisers and the team who have put their hard work into the two-day event.
The costs for attendance are as follows:
In person attendance: £15 for students / £20 for non-students
Online attendance: £5 for students / £6 for non students
You can view the programme and abstracts of speakers at https://oxfordbyzantinesociety.wordpress.com/accessible-programme-oubs-25th-international-graduate-conference/. The programme may change at short notice due to unforeseen circumstances, but we will endeavor to keep the programme on our website up to date to minimise disruption.
Please note, there is the option to pay either in advance through Eventbrite, or to pay on the day The second option is preferable as it saves the Eventbrite fee. Eventbrite charges 6.95% and £0.59 per ticket sold (plus VAT on the fee), which is almost £2 of each ticket. We now accept both card and cash (and have fixed our card machine). Please use the ‘Pay at Door’ option to register your interest even if not paying in advance, as this helps gauge participant numbers.
The conference is run on a tight budget and all funds go into its running, from the bursaries for travelling speakers, the lunches, refreshments, and the speakers’ dinner.
Please see above the programme, and we look forward to welcoming you to Oxford to celebrate a quarter-century of postgraduate Late Antique and Byzantine research with the OUBS. Long may it continue.
Best wishes,
Nathan, Tom, Jamie, and Yan.
OUBS Conference Committee
—————–
Oxford University Byzantine Society
“Bringing the Holy Land Home” explores the impact of art objects manufactured in the eastern Mediterranean on the visual culture of medieval England and western Europe. At its center are an iconic set of mold-made tiles, discovered at Chertsey Abbey outside of London, but probably commissioned for London’s Westminster Palace around 1250. These include a famous pair of roundels showing the English king Richard the Lionheart and the Ayyubid sultan Saladin (Salah al-Din) in combat. Excavated from the ruined site of Chertsey Abbey in the 19th century, the original composition of the fragmented tiles has been reconstructed, including their lost Latin texts. The reconstruction has demonstrated not only that the entire mosaic addressed the theme of the crusades, but also that its design evoked that of imported Byzantine and Islamic silks.
Carried home by crusaders, Byzantine and Islamic silks as well as ceramics, metalwork and other items were highly valued by European audiences, who incorporated them into sacred objects, displayed them in places of esteem, and imitated their designs – as was the case with the Chertsey tiles. The composition of the Chertsey floor relies on visual traditions of textiles developed by Muslim and Orthodox Christian artists in the eastern Mediterranean, even while the iconography attends to the theme of English victory over foreign opponents. By pairing the Chertsey tiles with contemporaneous European and eastern Mediterranean objects, this exhibition endeavors to illuminate the specific and complex contexts that informed the tiles’ production and design.
Along with the Chertsey tiles, on loan from the British Museum, this exhibition also displays the Morgan Library’s Crusader Bible and medieval objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Worcester art Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, and Harvard Art Museums.
Exhibition website at https://chertseytiles.
Exhibition catalogue with contributions from Michael Wood (OBE), Andrea Achi, Paroma Chatterjee, Meredith Fluke, Eurydice Georganteli, Sean Gilsdorf, Sarah Guerin, Cynthia Hahn, Eva R. Hoffman, Richard A. Leson, A. L. McClanan, Nina Masin-Moyer ’22, Grace P. Morrissey ’22, Suleiman Mourad, David Nicolle, Scott Redford, Euan Roger, Alicia Walker, and Elizabeth Dospel Williams, available at
https://www.brepols.net/
Registration details will be posted at https://chertseytiles.
Finally, if you would like to bring a group to visit the show on any date that the gallery is open (M-F 10 a.m. – 5 pm | Sat noon – 5 pm, Jan. 26-April 6), just email me to make arrangements. Admission and parking are free.
Conference: Multilingual Literary Practices In A Multicultural World, From Archaic Greece To The Byzantine Empire
November 14, 2023 – November 15, 2023
CALL FOR PAPERS
Multilingualism in the ancient world has been of great interest to linguists and literary scholars alike. Linguists investigate borrowings and structural convergences between two or more languages and explore broader sociolinguistic questions such as regional diversification and linguistic ideologies (e.g. Adams et al. 2002; Bentein 2016; Clackson et al. 2020; Hogeterp 2018; Kaimio 1979). Literary scholars look into the socio-cultural context within which literary works were produced and received and the linguistic background that Greek-speaking and writing authors had – including the linguistic norms and standards that they tried to uphold in the Greek language itself – framing it in the broader question of (the struggle for) cultural identity (Adams 2020; Andrade 2013; Bozia 2018; Goldhill 2011, Lee at al. 2014). For both research strands, Archaic Greek dialectal variety and its literary manifestations, as well as multidialectal and multilingual contacts in Classical Greek, have been of interest. Similarly, the Post-classical period (including the Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique periods) has been of particular relevance as a time of particularly intense language contact.
Scholars working in these two research strands tend to focus on different types of sources – literary and non-literary sources such as papyri and inscriptions – and adopt different methodologies, focusing on different types of research questions. The main aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, methodologies, and sources with the objective of developing a more integrated approach toward multilingual practices in various ways:
TOPICS MAY INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:
A thematic issue with selected contributions will be published by The Journal of Literary Multilingualism. Leiden: Brill.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
JAMES CLACKSON, University of Cambridge
MARK JANSE, Ghent University
ARIETTA PAPACONSTANTINOU, University of Reading
Interested scholars are invited to submit proposals (500 words max) by December 15th, 2022 to Eleni Bozia (bozia@ufl.edu), Klaas Bentein (Klaas.Bentein@UGent.be), and Chiara Monaco (Chiara.Monaco@UGent.be).
REFERENCES
Adams, J. N., Mark Janse, and Simon Swain. 2002. Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Adams, Sean. 2020. Greek Genres and Jewish Authors. Negotiating Literary Culture in the Greco-Roman Era. Baylor University Press.
Andrade, Nathanael J. 2013. Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World. Greek Culture in the Roman World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bentein, Klaas. 2016. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek: Have- and Be-Constructions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bozia, Eleni. 2018. “Immigration as acculturation: voluntary displacement in the Roman Empire.” In D. Arroyo (ed.) Displacement in language, Literature and Culture – 2016 CMLL Symposium, Selected Proceedings. Benalmádena, Málaga, Spain. 49-82.
Clackson, J., Patrick James, Katherine McDonald, Livia Tagliapetra, and Nicholas Zair. (eds.) 2020. Migration, Mobility, and Language Contact in and around the Ancient Mediterranean. Cambridge University Press.
Fournet, Jean-Luc. 2013. “Culture Grecque et Document Dans l’Égypte de l’Antiquité Tardive.” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 43: 135–62.
Goldhill, Simon. 2011. Being Greek under Rome. Cambridge, GBR: Cambridge University Press.
Hogeterp, Albert L. A. 2018. Semitisms in Luke’s Greek: A Descriptive Analysis of Lexical and Syntactical Domains of Semitic Language Influence in Luke’s Gospel. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament 401. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Kaimio, Jorma. 1979. “The Romans and the Greek Language.” Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 64: 1–379.
Lee, B.T., Ellen Finkelpearl, and Luca Graverini (eds.) 2014. Apuleius and Africa. Routledge.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
ELENI BOZIA, University of Florida
KLAAS BENTEIN, Ghent University
CHIARA MONACO, Ghent University
Call for Papers: The Ninth North American Syriac Symposium
“Syriac at the Center”
June 11-14, 2023
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut
Held every four years since 1991, the North American Syriac Symposium brings together scholars and students for exchange and discussion on a wide variety of topics related to the language, literature, and cultural history of Syriac Christianity, extending chronologically from the first centuries CE to the present day and geographically from Syriac Christianity’s homeland in the Middle East to South India, China, and the worldwide diaspora.
In 2023, the Ninth North American Syriac Symposium will be held in person at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, June 11 to June 14. Most of the event will be hosted at the Yale Divinity School, with the opportunity to visit the Dura-Europos exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery and to see an exhibition of Syriac manuscripts from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The theme of this Symposium is “Syriac at the Center.” Syriac has often been treated as an auxiliary language in the modern humanities, an adjunct tool to scholarship on Early Christianity, Late Antiquity, early Islam, the histories of theology and of science, and other areas of inquiry. It is an “extra language” in humanistic curricula. This conference welcomes papers on topics that treat Syriac as central, not peripheral, to scholarly investigation. How do our research subjects look when we stand with Syriac and regard other traditions and areas as peripheral?
Positions of center and periphery are matters of perspective, easily leading to one-sided views. We therefore encourage papers on this theme that rise above mere encomia to the importance of the Syriac traditions, but go further, showing how centering Syriac reveals new solutions to old problems, as well as new problems and areas of inquiry, and complicates current scholarly assumptions.
We welcome particularly papers addressing
Any investigation into the Syriac traditions has the potential to contribute to the main theme of the symposium. We therefore also welcome generally presentations by scholars on their current research, even if they do not directly address the symposium’s theme.
Please submit a title and abstract of proposed communication (150–200 words), to https://nass23.yale.edu by January 2, 2023. Accepted speakers will be notified in February 2023.
For inquiries concerning the symposium, please do not hesitate to reach out to nass23yale@gmail.com.
The organizers,
Jimmy Daccache, Maria Doerfler, Kevin van Bladel
NB: This symposium coincides with the 6th Yale Liturgy Conference, June 12-15, 2023, held at the Maurice R. Greenberg Conference Center, about five minutes’ walk from the Yale Divinity School. We expect to host a joint panel between both events and welcome proposals for contributions.
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