The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday February 19 with a hybrid lecture on:
Byzantine Greek: The weight of the past, the challenges of the present [in Greek]
Martin Hinterberger University of Cyprus
18:00 EET, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, V. Constantinou Av. 11635, Athens.
To join via Zoom please follow the link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1LqgwuM6RCCQSajR3s2ijg
You are cordially invited to attend a live Zoom talk on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 9 a.m. Pacific Time by our current Hellenic Research Fellow, Dr. Justin Willson. The talk is entitled “Maksim Grek Between Two Worlds.” The event will be recorded and archived on the Hellenic Research Fellowship Program (HRFP) page at https://library.csus.edu/tsakopoulos-hellenic-collection/hrfp.
See the following link for full details about the event: https://library.csus.edu/spotlight-and-events/maksim-grek-between-two-worlds.
The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the 2023–2024 edition of its annual lecture with the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.
Anthony Kaldellis is a Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.
Advance registration required at https://maryjahariscenter.org/
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Standing Committee on Medieval Studies.
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
India on the Red Sea: The Early Byzantine Awareness of East Africa and South Arabia
February 15, 2024, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Dumbarton Oaks Public Lecture with Benjamin Garstad
From the late third and early fourth centuries we find a number of Greek and Latin texts that refer to a country at the southern reaches of the Red Sea as India and its inhabitants as Indians — in regions that had once been known uniformly as Ethiopia or Arabia. This novel usage recognized the rise of the kingdom of Axum in Abyssinia, as well as Himyar, her neighbour and rival across the straits, as a major regional power and the growing importance of the Red Sea to the Roman Empire as an avenue of trade, but also as a theatre for carrying on conflicts by proxy with the old enemy, Persia. Calling them Indians distinguished the Axumites and the Himyarites from their neighbours, perhaps in terms of language and appearance, but undoubtedly in terms of politics and religious adherence. The negus in Axum and the emperor in Constantinople tended to enjoy friendly relations and the Axumites, unlike the Nilotic peoples who continued to raid the Province of Egypt, were early converts to Christianity. The designation of Abyssinians and Yemenites as Indians appears to have originated with a narrative of primeval migration from the Indus to the headwaters of the Nile, presented by Philostratus as a past-life recollection in the Life of Apollonius and integrated by Eusebius of Caesarea into his Chronicle. It thus gives us a fascinating insight into the ways that people in the late antique Mediterranean generated geographic and ethnographic knowledge and came to understand new and exotic people in the world around them.
After completing his PhD at the University of St Andrews under the supervision of Karla Pollmann and teaching and conducting research at his alma mater, the University of Calgary, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University, Benjamin Garstad began working at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, where he is currently Professor of Classics. Most of his work concentrates on the interstices of myth and history and of historiography and fiction in late antique literature. He is the editor and translator of Pseudo-Methodius, Apocalypse; An Alexandrian World Chronicle in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library (2012) and the author of Bouttios and Late Antique Antioch: Reconstructing a Lost Historian, published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2022.
Zoom registration: https://doaks-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wD4iEhuNQmm27L6ZPdPQLw#/registration
In person registration: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/public-lecture-in-byzantine-studies-tickets-803003574307?aff=oddtdtcreator
Caption: Waxeba (Axum), Copper, Coin (Uncertain Value), Uncertain Mint, circa 340-circa 400. Dumbarton Oaks, BZC.2009.014
Alt-text for obverse, same for reverse: Bust of a draped man facing right enclosed in a circle
The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday January 22 with a hybrid lecture on:
Some aspects of the relations of Basil II with the higher clergy [in Greek]
Vassiliki Vlysidou, National Hellenic Research Foundation
18:00 EET, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, V. Constantinou Av. 11635, Athens.
To join via Zoom please follow the link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DRfFadVOT-iuJ0P8W7Mn6g
The TORCH Network Poetry in the Medieval World will start in January 2024 (Hilary Term).
Poetry in the Medieval World explores premodern literature from a global perspective, it is an infrastructure for learning and dialoguing on medieval poetry through a cross-disciplinary approach.
How was poetry produced and transmitted? This is one of the themes which will be discussed together with, for example, reception and the challenges of translations into modern languages, especially into English. We address relevant and intertwined questions about poetry and our understanding of it. The hope is to pave the way for innovative ideas towards a new, choral theory of medieval literature.
Our case study is poetry between c. 600 and c. 1250 CE. We are organising in-presence reading groups as well as hybrid and online events.
You can find more information about the events and our newsletter here: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/
If you want to reach out directly to us, you can write an email to Ugo Mondini at ugo.mondini@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday December 18, 2023 with a hybrid lecture on:
Survey ceramic assemblages as Byzantine household archaeology
Athanasios Vionis University of Cyprus
18:00 EET, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, V. Constantinou Av. 11635, Athens.
To join via Zoom please follow the link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NbwbTQQ3TTO2BS-UJ27RWQ
The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2023–2024 East of Byzantium lecture series.
Michael Pifer is Assistant Professor of Armenian Language & Literature at the University of Michigan. Dr. Pifer is a specialist in Armenian cultural production with an emphasis on the development of vernacular Armenian literature during the medieval period. His work focuses on how Armenian literature developed alongside neighboring literary traditions within shared spaces. His interests turn around questions of multilingualism, mixed-script writing, and the ways in which premodern poets attempted to accommodate certain forms of cultural difference within their compositions. By decentering monolingual approaches to literary history, his research aims to contribute to knowledge about cross-cultural dialogism across the literary landscapes of premodern Armenia and its adjacent regions. He is the author of Kindred Voices: A Literary History of Medieval Anatolia (Yale University Press, 2021) and a coeditor of An Armenian Mediterranean: Words and Worlds in Motion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
An East of Byzantium lecture. EAST OF BYZANTIUM is a partnership between the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies at Harvard University and the Mary Jaharis Center that explores the cultures of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire in the late antique and medieval periods.
The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on November 20 with a hybrid lecture on:
The renaissance of gold coinage in the late medieval Mediterranean and the Byzantine model
Cécile Morrisson Centre national de la recherche scientifique
18:00 EET, National Hellenic Research Foundation, 48, V. Constantinou Av. 11635, Athens.
To join via Zoom please follow the link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_33kA-1eVTAGtESuSTw4YiA
Friends of the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection are cordially invited to attend a live Zoom talk on Tuesday, Nov. 14, by our current Hellenic Research Fellow, Dr. Tomos Evans. (The event will be recorded and archived on the Hellenic Research Fellowship Program (HRFP) page at https://library.csus.edu/tsakopoulos-hellenic-collection/hrfp.
See the relevant event details below.
Title: “The First English Philhellene? John Milton and Advocating Greece’s Liberation in the Seventeenth Century”
Abstract: In this lecture, Dr. Tomos Evans will share his ongoing research for a chapter titled ‘“When the Greeks Ceased to be Greek”: John Milton and Early Modern Greece’ of his monograph-in-progress, Milton’s Hellenism. This chapter largely explores John Milton’s relationship with the Greek diplomat and scholar, Leonard Philaras. He will share his archival research from the Netherlands, Italy, and the UK on Philaras and demonstrate the ways that his research on Early Modern Greece has been benefitted by the resources of the Tsakopoulos Hellenic Collection at California State University, Sacramento. This lecture will explore Philaras’s network (ranging from Venice to Moscow) and his extraordinary efforts to bring about a revolutionary uprising in Ottoman-ruled Greece. In turn, Dr Evans will explore the developments of Milton’s political Philhellenism and the vital role that Philaras played in changing Milton’s attitudes towards contemporary Greeks.
Date: Nov. 14, 2023
Time: 10 a.m. Pacific time
Access: https://csus.zoom.us/j/84763273940?pwd=UGZqeWlWd3kvamtoZWJKRVQ4bEk4UT09
Meeting ID: 847 6327 3940
Passcode: 499384
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