United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies (USNCBS)

The United States National Committee for Byzantine Studies (USNCBS) is the United States affiliate of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines (AIEB).  As such, the chief functions of the U.S. National Committee are to encourage Byzantine studies in the United States and to represent the interests of scholars from the United States in the planning of the International Byzantine Congresses that occur every five years under the auspices of the AIEB.

The USNCBS represents the United States in the meetings of representatives of the various national committees that choose a theme for each International Byzantine Congress and suggest various topics for round tables and colloquia, as well as potential speakers and colloquia chairs.

The Committee was organized and incorporated in 1986 to host and administer the Seventeenth International Congress of Byzantine Studies meeting in Washington, D.C. Originally a closed membership organization where members were voted in by the Executive Committee on the basis of academic position and/or published scholarship, the nature of the membership roll was changed in 2006.  At the business meeting of the Byzantine Studies Conference that year, the executive committee of the U.S. National Committee agreed to merge the USNCBS with the Byzantine Studies Association of North America (BSANA) and become a standing committee of BSANA. Henceforth, the constituency of the USNCBS was deemed to be the whole community of Byzantine scholars in the United States included in the BSANA mailing list and in good standing in BSANA. Members of BSANA who are employed at institutions in Canada or are independent scholars residing in Canada are represented by the Canadian Committee of Byzantinists (CCB).

At the business meeting of BSANA during November of 2022 at the Byzantine Studies Conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, participants from the United States chose three officers to direct the USNCBS: Leonora Neville (University of Wisconsin-Madison) became President; Cecily Hilsdale (McGill University) became Vice President (McGill University); Andrea Achi (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) became Secretary; Benjamin Anderson (Cornell University) became the Alternate.

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