This final meeting will explore the complex ways in which ideas, beliefs, values and practices appealing to classical antiquity – however defined – played out in the realm of visual culture and its broader contexts, particularly from the 10th-14th centuries. Bringing together scholars with expertise in diverse fields spanning the arts, sciences, philosophy, and intellectual culture of both China and Byzantium, the conference aims to explore connections and commonalities among different visual media, and to advance our understanding of how developments in visuality and visual culture were linked to changes in thought, values, and intellectual life more broadly.
Monday 9 May to Wednesday 11 May 2022
The new Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies (CLAIBS) aims to galvanise collaboration across the three thriving fields of Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies at Edinburgh and beyond. Based in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology it promotes collaborative projects, interdisciplinary research and teaching – at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels – in Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies across the College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences and in close cooperation with neighbouring universities.
The School very cordially invites you to join the launch event either in person or online.
Tuesday 3 May 2022
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 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 11–13, 2023. We invite session proposals on any topic relevant to Byzantine studies.
The 58th International Congress on Medieval Studies will include traditional in-person sessions, virtual sessions, and new blended-format sessions that make it possible for speakers to present and audiences to attend both in-person and online.
Session proposals must be submitted through the Mary Jaharis Center website (https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/58th-icms). The deadline for submission is May 16, 2022.
If the proposed session is approved, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse a maximum of 4 session participants (presenters and moderator) up to $600 maximum for scholars based in North America and up to $1200 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. For scholars participating remotely, the Mary Jaharis Center will reimburse participants for conference registration.
For further details and submission instructions, please visit https://maryjahariscenter.org/sponsored-sessions/58th-icms.
Please contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
Symposium—Rethinking the Wearable in the Middle Ages
April 28–29, 2022
Zoom / 38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall, Bard Graduate Center
Covering, protecting, and adorning the body count among the most fundamental of human concerns, at once conveying aspects of an individual’s persona while also situating a person within a given social context. Wearable adornment encompasses materials fashioned by human hands (like fabric, metalwork, or even animal bones) and modifications to the body itself (such as tattoos, cosmetics, or hairstyles), which beautify the body while simultaneously conveying social, political, and protective functions and meanings. The wearable is thus the most representational and at the same time most intimate product of material culture.
This conference seeks to expand our current understanding of the wearable in the Middle Ages. Current scholarship on the topic in Byzantine, western medieval, Eurasian art, as well as Islamic traditions tends to encompass clothing and jewelry, and is frequently medium-specific, with minimal regard to the interrelatedness of different aspects of appearance. On the one hand, work on medieval textiles has tended to approach questions of identity, consumption, and appearance by comparing textual sources and visual depictions with surviving textiles. The study of medieval jewelry, on the other hand, largely focuses on the classification and attribution of precious metal pieces from excavations and museum collections, as scholars make sense of pieces long removed from the bodies they once adorned. Tattoos, prosthetics, cosmetics and headgear are almost entirely absent in our understandings of medieval dress practices. This separation was not always so, however, and indeed nineteenth-century art historians such as Gottfried Semper integrated all aspects of bodily adornment in their considerations of the nature of ornamentation and surface decoration.
TGHS Postgraduate Conference Call for Papers:
Encounters and Exchanges in a Global Past
The Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar is inviting submissions for a postgraduate conference, Saturday 25 June, 2022. The conference will be held in person in the Oxford History Faculty.
We welcome submissions on the theme ‘Encounters and Exchanges in a Global Past.’ We will explore the ways in which encounters and exchanges were experienced in the near and distant past. Despite the recent proliferation of frameworks for understanding contact and the exchange of goods, ideas and biota that accompanied it, contact is rarely considered from a truly global perspective that spans millennia, continents and disciplines.
We welcome interdisciplinary submissions relating to exchanges across time and space. We are particularly interested in submissions on the infrastructure that underlay encounters and exchanges, such as technology and ideology; multi-scalar interaction; the role of translation in contact; the environmental history of encounters and exchanges.
Sessions will consist of 20 minute papers with time for questions and discussion.
Interested postgraduates should send a 400-word abstract and brief biography to oxfordtghs@gmail.com
Submission deadline: 1 May 2022
International Workshop – The Holy Book of the Ishmaelites in the World of Eastern Christianity
May 11-12, 2022 | University of Copenhagen
The Holy Book of the Ishmaelites was the name commonly used by Eastern Christians of various traditions to refer to the Qur’an. Since the emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity, Eastern Christians speaking Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Greek, Church Slavonic, Russian and Syriac came in contact with Islam and its Holy Scripture. From the Mediterranean lands to Russia via the Balkans, Anatolia and Caucasus, the experience of Eastern Christians with their Muslim neighbors and/or rulers was shaped by diverse multicultural and multiconfessional contexts in which their approach to the Qur’an played a significant role in defining religious identity and the dynamics of communal life.
This international workshop will explore how Eastern Christians engaged with the Qur’an and its Islamic interpretations from the medieval period until the end of the eighteenth century. Bringing together different religious traditions, one of the main scopes of the workshop is to build a platform of discussion between scholars working with source material from Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Georgian, Greek, Church Slavonic, Russian and Syriac contexts, with a focus on how these milieus shaped Eastern Christian responses to Islam and its Holy Scripture.
How did texts on Islam and Qur’an circulate within groups and networks? How did they cross confessional boundaries? Who were their authors and intended audiences? These and similar questions will guide the discussions, and will generate – we hope – new debates for the entangled history and cross-cultural history of the Eastern Christian communities from the medieval to the dawn of modernity.
Read the program:
https://euqu.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Event-converti-compresse.pdf
Register here:
https://ucph-ku.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5AqcuGspjktH93svOnXSrz5mTS1aiGf8qwc
The Byzantines and the Sea in Text and Images
Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies and Online
March 25–27, 2022
The International Conference The Byzantines and the Sea in Text and Images will be held at the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice and live-streamed (YouTube and Zoom) on March 25–27, 2022.