Call for Papers [Deadline: April 1, 2022]

Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture (ASEC) Ninth Biennial Conference

The Ohio State University, November 3-5, 2022

The Association for the Study of Eastern Christian History and Culture, Inc. (ASEC) announces its ninth biennial conference to be held at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio, November 3-5, 2022 (with a pre-conference reception on Thursday, November 3rd).

The theme is “Eastern Christianity in New Worlds,” broadly conceived to address the impact on Eastern Christianity of relocation outside its traditional homelands—and its own impact on its new environments (pluralism, globalization). Papers are also welcome that do not explicitly address these topics. This conference seeks to provide a special opportunity for advanced graduate students and recent PhDs to present and workshop their work. Scholars from all disciplines are invited to participate.

Our keynote speaker, Aram G. Sarkisian, is a historian of religion, immigration, and labor in the twentieth-century United States. Blending methodologies of social history and the academic study of religion, his research probes the everyday lived experiences of Russian Orthodox Christians in the industrial United States, exploring how believers’ religious worlds helped them to navigate their neighborhoods and workplaces, the assimilationist pressures of nativism, and the tumults of geopolitical change. He is currently completing his first book manuscript, A Helper and Protector: Russian Orthodox Christians in the United States, 1893-1924, which explores how the Russian Orthodox Church built a wide-reaching, transnational network of spiritual and material aid for working-class immigrant believers at the turn of the twentieth century, only for those efforts to be challenged both by the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and the United States’ first Red Scare. A native of the Detroit area, he completed his PhD in History at Northwestern University in 2019 and has since taught history at Northwestern, as well as at National Louis University in Chicago.

Dr. Sarkisian will speak on: “What are you going to do about it?” Excavating Histories of Orthodox Christianity in North America.

Either panel proposals (three papers) or individual paper proposals can be submitted. Send paper and panel proposals with abstracts of 100-200 words for each paper, and a brief one-page curriculum vitae for each participant to Nadia Kizenko (nkizenko@albany.edu). The deadline for proposals is April 1, 2022.

Limited funding is available to provide graduate students with assistance for travel expenses. Paper presenters must be members of ASEC.

Local conference co-sponsors include the Hilandar Research Library (HRL), the Resource Center for Medieval Slavic Studies (RCMSS), the departments of Classics, History, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, and University Libraries. For more information on the conference and its venue, contact HRL curator and RCMSS director Mary-Allen “Pasha” Johnson (hilandar@osu.edu).

Nadieszda Kizenko
Professor of History
Director of Religious Studies
nkizenko@albany.edu

Sung, Written and Painted. The Akathistos Hymnos and Intermedial Compositional Processes in Later Byzantium

Göttingen, 2-3 June 2022

Painted cycles based on the Akathistos represent one of the great novelties of late Byzantine art, translating a by then already ancient piece of liturgical music into the world of visual art. However, even though the Akathistos Hymn to the Virgin Mary has been studied quite extensively, the relationship between its text, music, and illustrations has not yet been fully explored.

Building on the Akathistos Hymn, the planned conference will examine late Byzantine intermedial compositional processes. Painted cycles based on the Akathistos should be studied as a product of the interaction between hymnography, psalmody, and visual art – not just as a mere visualisation of a text. Illuminated and notated manuscript copies of the hymn ought to be examined as evidence for varied liturgical and devotional practices. Icons and murals that illustrate the Akathistos need to be seen as constituent elements of sacred space. At the same time, the broader social and religious context(s) for the hymn’s use during the late Byzantine period need to be considered.

Methodologically, the conference will have as its focus the concept of intermediality, that is, the interface between various media of cultural expression. The organisers hope that it will contribute towards bridging the methodological gaps that separates various scholarly approaches to the study of medieval culture.

We invite proposals in all disciplines related to Byzantine Studies, broadly construed, addressing the Akathistos – or other medieval evidence with a similar approach to intermediality and compositional processes. Contributions from graduate and early career researchers are particularly welcome. Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be sent to Jon C. Cubas Díaz (jon.cubasdiaz@uni-goettingen.de) by 15 March 2022. Travel and accommodation expenses of accepted speakers will be reimbursed. The conference will be held in Göttingen as a hybrid event on 2-3 June 2022 and is funded as part of the “Niedersächsisches Vorab”- initiative of the Volkswagen Stiftung and the Culture and Science Ministry.

Confirmed speakers include: Thomas Arentzen, Guoda Gediminskaite, Friederike Kranig, Georgi Parpulov and Christian Troelsgård.