Editing the Greek Psalter, Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Zoom, December 1–3, 2021

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“Editing the Greek Psalter” signals the launch of the Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The aim of the project is to explore the tradition and textual history of the Greek Psalter, and to prepare a new critical edition of the Septuagint Psalms and Odes for the Göttingen series, which will substitute the outdated edition by Alfred Rahlfs (1931). At the end, the critically reconstructed text will appear in a hybrid edition, printed as a book and presented online.

Cappadocia Through Time: from Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire (4-5 Dec 2021)

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Cappadocia Through Time: from Byzantium to the Ottoman Empire (4-5 Dec 2021)
Zoom link/Σύνδεσμος zoom: https://authgr.zoom.us/j/97406174472
PROGRAM
Saturday 4 December
16.45 Welcome
16.50 PAGONA PAPADOPOULOU (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) Cappadocia Through Time: An Introduction
CAPPADOCIA, A BYZANTINE PROVINCE
17.00 ROBERT OUSTERHOUT (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Imagining a Cappadocian Future
17.30 ANASTASIOS ΤANTSIS (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) Architectural Planning in the Built and Rock-cut Churches of Cappadocia: Construction and De-construction
17.50 Break
18.10 ANDREA DE PASCALE, ANDREA BIXIO, ROBERTO BIXIO (Centro Studi Sotterranei, Genoa, Italy) Hypogeal Works of Defence Among the Rock-cut Churches of Göreme
18.30 ANDREA DE PASCALE, ANDREA BIXIO, ROBERTO BIXIO (Centro Studi Sotterranei, Genoa, Italy) Updated Report on Hydric Facilities in the Rocky Cappadocia
18.50 SOPHIA GERMANIDOU (Newcastle University, UK)
Covering Subsistence Needs in Byzantine Cappadocia: Comments on Its Agro-pastoral Products
19.10 Discussion
Sunday 5 December
MEDIEVAL CAPPADOCIA: BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
17.00 SCOTT REDFORD (SOAS, University of London, UK) The Human Geography of Medieval Cappadocia
17.30 OYA PANCAROĞLU (Boğaziçi University, Turkey) New Institutions for Ancient Topographies: Danishmendid Architectural Ventures in Twelfth-Century Caesarea/Kayseri
17.50 SUZAN YALMAN (Koç University, Turkey) Of Saints and Fairies: A Seljuk Queen Mother’s Patronage in Cappadocia
18.10 PASCHALIS ANDROUDIS (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) In Search of Greek and Greek Origin Patrons, Painters and Craftsmen in Thirteenth-Century Seljuk Cappadocia
18.30 SARA NUR YILDIZ (Università degli studi, Firenze, Italy) Mongol Qishlaqs on the Cappadocian Steppe
18.50 Discussion

54th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies

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The 54th Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies: Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond – 18-20 March 2022, Corpus Christus College & All Souls College, Oxford (deadline 10th December)
The 54th Annual Spring Symposium in Byzantine Studies will be held in Oxford on the theme of Material Religion in Byzantium and Beyond. The Symposium brings together Byzantine studies with a series of innovative approaches to the material nature and realities of religion – foregrounding the methodological, historical and archaeological problems of studying religion through visual and material culture. Taking a broad geographical and chronological view of the Byzantine world, the Symposium will range across Afro-Eurasia and from Antiquity to the period after the fall of Constantinople. Panels will be arranged around the themes of ‘Objects in motion’, ‘Religion in 3D’, ‘Religious landscapes’, ‘Things without context’, ‘Things and their context’ and ‘Spatial approaches to religion’.
In addition to the customary panel papers, an inaugural lecture and a closing lecture for a wider public, we now invite Communications of 10 minutes in duration on current research in fields linked to the theme of the Symposium. Please send your abstract (of not more than 300 words) to Ine Jacobs (Ine.Jacobs@univ.ox.ac.uk) by 10 December 2021.

Call for Papers, Historiography and Life Writing in the Late Antique World

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Historiography and Life Writing in the Late Antique World
Call for Papers
Proposals for papers are sought for a hybrid conference (participation possible both in person and online) on June 16th–17th 2022 exploring the writing of historiography in context of the developments in biographical literature during late antiquity.
The relationship between historiography and biography in antiquity has always been an uneasy one. Despite their mutual interest in strong characters, the writing of history and the writing of lives were regarded by ancient authors as two distinct genres. This separation proved influential too among modern scholars, but there have long existed voices suggesting that the boundaries between the two were much more blurred in practice (Momigliano 1971; Geiger 1985; Kraus 2010). Such considerations are particularly important for the later period because of the dynamic literary transformations it catalysed. The changing literary landscape from the fourth century on, in East and West, was shaped not only by the rise of new genres but also by the shift, redefinition, and even breakdown of established generic boundaries (Greatrex/Elton 2015).
Recent scholarship has shown the fruitful interrelationships with contemporary literature of both later historiography (Blaudeau/van Nuffelen 2015; van Nuffelen 2019; Conterno/Mazzola 2020) and biography (Urbano 2013, Hägg/Rousseau 2000). But the link between the two remains largely unexplored. With the emergence of new biographical sub-genres – like hagiography or heresiology – and the blossoming of old ones – such as panegyric or philosophical biography – historians could draw on a hitherto unmatched spectrum of different models when incorporating the lives and deeds of individual characters into their historical narratives. This conference aims to investigate how historians adjusted to this increasing diversity of life-writing and what impact this development had on the evolution of historiography.
We invite scholars of varied specialisms and disciplinary backgrounds interested in the history and literature of the late antique world to submit 500-word abstracts for 30-minute papers. Papers might treat, for example:
  • the factors that influenced historians’ choice of a particular model of biographical presentation over another;
  • the incorporation and adaptation of biographical source material (including translations) into historiography;
  • how historians played with their readers’ expectations by both alluding to and breaking the generic conventions of different types of biographical literature;
  • the differences in the presentation of lives across the historiographical traditions of alternative writing cultures, like Syriac or Coptic;
  • how imagined audiences determined the stylistic and compositional choices of historians narrating the life of a historical character.
We are happy to announce Peter van Nuffelen (Ghent University) and Anne Alwis (University of Kent) as confirmed keynote speakers of the conference.
Applications from all scholars, including postgraduate students, are welcome. Abstracts of 500 words should be sent to karl.dahm@kcl.ac.uk by 5.00pm on 14th January 2022.

Byzantine Congress Deadlines

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Abstracts of Free Communications and Abstracts for Organized Panels for Free Communications for the 22nd International Congress of Byzantine Studies (Venice and Padau, 22-27 August 2022) need to be uploaded to the Congress website between December 20, 2021 and April 1, 2022. NOTE: These deadlines are later than we were told earlier.

All abstracts submitted by April/May 2021 have been accepted!!

In order to upload your abstract, you must have paid your registration fee.

For instructions and to register, see

Deadlines

Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency in Byzantium. Lecture and Conference

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Moving Byzantium: An International Conference

A public lecture and a three-day international conference mark six years of joint research by an international team on ‘Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency in Byzantium’ that was made possible by the award of the Wittgensteinpreis to Prof. Claudia Rapp (University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences).

The events may be followed online, after pre-registration. Program and registration links as follows:

Thursday, 18 November, 17.00-19.00, Grussworte, Rückblick (Rapp), Vortrag ‚Das Ende der Mobilität: der späte Attila und der Kollaps des Hunnenreiches‘ (Mischa Meier)  (in German)

https://www.byzneo.univie.ac.at/aktuelles/aktuelles/news/mobility-in-focus-byzantium/?tx_news_pi1%5Bcontroller%5D=News&tx_news_pi1%5Baction%5D=detail&cHash=f8aa636d9a5d552f2a0553b61e2063f3

Friday through Sunday, 19 to 21 November, 14.00 to 19.00

In this concluding conference (in English), the team members present aspects of their own research in dialogue with colleagues who are working on related topics. 

https://www.byzneo.univie.ac.at/aktuelles/aktuelles/news/moving-byzantium-international-conference/?tx_news_pi1%5Bcontroller%5D=News&tx_news_pi1%5Baction%5D=detail&cHash=752d72bf99e600b9c46a988399826077

Oxford University Byzantine Society – Call for Papers

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Reshaping the World: Utopias, Ideals and Aspirations in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

24th International Graduate Conference of the Oxford University Byzantine Society

 25th—26th February 2022, in Oxford and Online

 

‘There is nothing better than imagining other worlds – he said – to forget the

painful one we live in. At least so I thought then. I hadn’t yet realized

that, imagining other worlds, you end up changing this one’.

– Umberto Eco, Baudolino

It is the creative power of imagination that Baudolino described to a fictionalised Niketas Choniates in this dialogue from Eco’s homonymous novel (2000). The creation of idealised imaginary worlds has the power to change the past, the present and the future. When imagination is directed towards more worldly goals, it becomes aspiration and such aspiration can influence policies of reform. When imagination is unrestrained, utopias are born.

The Oxford University Byzantine Society’s twenty-fourth International Graduate Conference seeks to explore the impact utopias, ideals and aspirations had in changing the course of history and, therefore, how imagined or alternative realities shaped the Late Antique and Byzantine world(s), broadly understood.

Our conference provides a forum for postgraduate and early-career scholars to reflect on this theme through a variety of cultural media and (inter)disciplinary approaches. In doing so, we hope to facilitate the interaction and engagement of historians, philologists, archaeologists, art historians, theologians and specialists in material culture. To that end, we encourage submissions encompassing, but not limited to, the following themes:

 

  • Theological and/or philosophical usage of utopias in the depictions of the ideal society, of the afterlife, or to serve a particular worldview;
  • Political, administrative, martial, economic and religious reforms as embodiments of aspirations or ideals;
  • Allegory as both a literary and philosophical tool that endowed texts with new and original meanings;
  • The ‘Byzantine novel’ and utopias: sceneries, characters and endings;
  • ‘Chivalry’ in Byzantium as a form of utopia, for example in works such as Digenis Akritis;
  • Language purism as a form of utopia;
  • Encomia, hagiography and historiography used to cater to and curate idealised images;
  • Numismatics, for example the depiction of harmonious imperial families on coinage in defiance of ‘reality’;
  • Gift-giving and exchange of luxury goods to communicate ideals or aspirations;
  • The performance of ceremony and ritual to suggest the continuity, legitimacy and permanence of imperial power;
  • The ideal city in various artistic media, for example frescos and manuscript illuminations;
  • Utopian ideas conveyed through material objects like seals or epigraphs;
  • Utopia and manuscript culture, for example the ‘perfect book’, illuminations of utopia/dystopia, and ‘idealised’ writing styles; and,
  • Byzantium as a utopia in the post-1453 imagination.

 

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a short academic biography in the third person, to the Oxford University Byzantine Society by Friday 19th November 2021 at byzantine.society@gmail.com. Papers should be twenty minutes in length and may be delivered in English or French. As with previous conferences, selected papers will be published in an edited volume, chosen and reviewed by specialists from the University of Oxford. Speakers wishing to have their papers considered for publication should aim to be as close to the theme as possible in their abstract and paper. Nevertheless, all submissions are warmly invited.

To read the full text of the call for papers, please visit the OUBS website here: https://oxfordbyzantinesociety.wordpress.com/24th-oubs-international-graduate-conference-2022/

The conference will have a hybrid format, taking place both in Oxford and online. Accepted speakers are strongly encouraged to participate in person, but livestreamed papers are also warmly welcomed.

Alberto Ravani

James Cogbill

Arie Neuhauser

Tom Alexander

Seals and Society in the Medieval World

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Seals and Society in the Medieval World
Virtual Colloquium in Byzantine Studies
Date: Friday, October 29th from 9:00-4:15pm ET
Where: Via Zoom
To mark the completion of the Dumbarton Oaks Online Catalogue of Byzantine Seals in 2021, Dumbarton Oaks is hosting a colloquium to explore the production, function, inscriptions, iconographic designs, and significance of seals. Building on the instant accessibility to the Byzantine seals collection and the research possibilities made available by the online catalogue, this colloquium invites scholars working on seals from Byzantine, European, and Middle Eastern medieval contexts to discuss and engage with each other’s material and to bring innovative, comparative perspectives to a specialized discipline entering a new phase.
Colloquiarchs: Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak (New York University), Eric McGeer (Dumbarton Oaks), and Jonathan Shea (Dumbarton Oaks)
Free and open to the public. Register here: https://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/scholarly-activities/seals-and-society-in-the-medieval-world

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