Conference: Contested Heritage: Adaptation, Restoration & Innovation in the Late Antique & Byzantine World
Oxford University Byzantine Society’s 21st International Graduate Conference, Oxford, 22-23 February 2019
Byzantines considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the ancient world, a title they passionately defended against emerging empires east and west that also claimed hereditary rights to the Graeco-Roman past. From the fostering of cultural, scientific, and literary revivals and the commissioning of projects that used a well-established artistic and architectural vocabulary to the collection, conservation and display of consecrated ancient artefacts, anachronism was a powerful political and cultural tool, frequently used to build analogies with either past prosperity or a divine eternity.
Including contributions on political, social, literary, architectural and artistic history, and covering geographical areas throughout the central and eastern Mediterranean and beyond, this conference aims to provide a kaleidoscopic view of how cultural heritage was constructed, perceived and maintained in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.
Please follow the link for the conference website, which includes the full programme and the conference booklet.
Attendance fees are payable on registration. These are £15 for OUBS members and £20 for all other attendees.
Call for Papers: Medieval Religion(s)
58th Annual Midwest Medieval History Conference, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, USA, 20-21 September 2019
Deadline: 8 March 2019
The conference will begin on Friday afternoon with graduate papers and a keynote by Anne E. Lester, John W. Baldwin and Jenny Jochens Associate Professor of Medieval History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women’s Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne and has co-edited volumes on medieval materiality, religious movements, and crusades and memory.
The remainder of Friday and Saturday’s program will feature scholarly papers on all aspects of medieval history, especially those related to this year’s theme: Medieval Religion(s), and an exhibit of manuscripts. We welcome papers by graduate students (those presenting receive an honorarium), and independent, early-stage, and senior scholars. The programming committee is also happy to consider proposals addressing teaching, pedagogy, and digital humanities. Abstracts of 250-300 words may be emailed to the program chair, Jessalynn Bird, at jbird@saintmarys.edu. Queries regarding organization may be sent to the conference organizer, Daniel Hobbins, at dhobbins@nd.edu.
Grant: The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation : Venetian Research programme grants
Deadline: 1 May 2019
Venetian Resesarch Programme: British and Commonwealth Applicants.
The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation – British and Commonwealth Committee – announces its 2019-20 programme of grants for study based on travel to and research in Venice and the Venetian dominions.
Grants will be awarded for historical research on Venice and the former Venetian empires, and for the study of contemporary Venetian society and culture. Applicants from all disciplines of the humanities are eligible for areas of study including, but not limited to: archaeology, architecture, art; bibliography; economics; history; history of science; law; literature; music; political thought; religion theatre, film and television. Applications for research on the environment and conservation are welcomed. Other, relevant, research interests will be considered.
For details, see https://royalhistsoc.org/the-gladys-krieble-delmas-foundation-venetian-research-programme-grants/
Grant: Bliss Symposium Awards
Deadline: 1 March 2019
Each year, Dumbarton Oaks hosts the Byzantine Studies Symposium. The Bliss Symposium Awards, which offer partial reimbursement for the cost of travel to Washington, DC, local accommodations, and other approved expenses related to symposium attendance are now expanded to include non-Harvard students. Students from both US and international institutions are encouraged to apply. Available to both graduate and undergraduate students with a demonstrated interest in Byzantine Studies, applications are due by March 1 to Byzantine@doaks.org.
Job: Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art/Archaeology, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., USA
Deadline: 28 February 2019
Dumbarton Oaks is a research institute affiliated with Harvard University that supports research internationally in the field of Byzantine Studies. In addition to world-renowned library and museum collections, Dumbarton Oaks’ Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) holds more than a million unique items in a variety of media. Dumbarton Oaks is launching a three-year Access Initiative to expand opportunities to engage with its resources and collections by scholars and the general public. One goal of the Access Initiative is to create more professional opportunities for early-career PhDs in the areas of study supported by Dumbarton Oaks. The Postdoctoral Fellowship in Byzantine Art/Archaeology (ICFA) is one of several opportunities that Dumbarton Oaks is announcing for 2019/2020 under this initiative.
The Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art/Archaeology will receive training in archival processing and digital curation and will support digitization initiatives to increase access to ICFA collections for scholars and the public. The Fellow will be fully integrated into the Library and Byzantine Program and will work closely with staff and Dumbarton Oaks researchers to establish intellectual control over ICFA’s multi-media holdings. The Fellow will support the ongoing cataloging of the Frank Kidner archive of Syria photos from the 1990s, a collection of nearly 10,000 color slides documenting in rich detail a great number of sites, including many that have now been fundamentally altered or completely destroyed. As that project reaches completion, the Fellow will assist with setting priorities for the cataloging, processing, and digitization of other collections related to Byzantine Art and Archaeology, based on their intellectual and cultural significance. Outcomes of the fellowship may include a research gateway similar to Dumbarton Oaks’ Moche Iconography site: https://www.doaks.org/resources/moche-iconography. This fellowship offers unique opportunities to build career skills in special collections and digital technologies while benefitting from the unique resources of Dumbarton Oaks. The Fellow will benefit from Dumbarton Oaks’ dynamic community of scholars and programming in Byzantine Studies and will devote 20% of the fellowship time to personal research.
For full details and applications, see https://www.doaks.org/about/employment/post-doctoral-fellow-in-byzantine-art-archaeology-image-collections-and-fieldwork-archives-icfa-dumbarton-oaks-research-library
Job: Museum Director, Dumbarton Oaks
Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., USA
Dumbarton Oaks is a Harvard research institute, museum, library, and historic garden in Washington, D.C. The institute supports research and learning internationally in Byzantine, Garden and Landscape, and Pre-Columbian studies. The Museum is renowned for its world-class Byzantine and Pre-Columbian collections, and select works of European art. The Museum, open six days/week free of charge, has close ties to local and Harvard communities and engages scholars and visitors from all over the world through exhibitions, gallery talks, and class visits. Dumbarton Oaks is a vibrant home of the humanities with an overarching mission of communicating the value of culture and advanced research to the broadest possible public.
The Museum Director will lead the Museum team in planning and delivering innovative exhibits that will highlight the Dumbarton Oaks collections and may include collaborations with the three programs of study and the library, rare book, and image collections. The Museum Director will oversee long-term exhibition planning, budget, and all aspects of Museum operations, in close conjunction with other departments of Dumbarton Oaks. The ideal candidate will combine deep knowledge of at least one area of the Dumbarton Oaks collections with the promise of strong leadership and a proven record of collaboration. The incumbent will join Dumbarton Oaks at an exciting time of expansion of both our academic and our public programs and will be encouraged to foster links between the Museum and the research institute, help develop new educational programs for DC students, and provide open and free access to the collections through digital initiatives.
For full details and online application, see DO’s website.
Call for Papers: Moving Forms: The Transformations and Translocations of Medieval Literature
Athens, Greece 11-13 September 2019
Deadline: 1 March 2019
The movement of people and books across space and time – mobility and portability – were driving forces of medieval European literary and intellectual culture. Men and women, clerical and secular, constructed extensive social networks and communities through travel, written communication, and the exchange of texts. Shared literary practices and forms occurred at the regional and transregional levels, defining local identities and forging links between people separated by distance and time. Around the North Sea and Baltic littorals, legends from the Norse sagas, for instance, were taken up by writers. On a larger scale, people from north-western Europe to China exchanged stories of Barlaam and Josephat, while tales of Alexander are found from India to Ireland; in both cases, transmission was facilitated by the movement of people along the Silk Road. Rather than a full picture, often we are left with a set of trails, traces and clues that challenge us to create narratives out of the fragments.
This symposium aims to contribute to the understanding of medieval literature through the development of methodologies which examine the intersection of social networks and communities with literary forms. We welcome papers that attend to the agency of people (men and women), genres (literary, scientific, philosophical, legal etc.), modes (verse, poetry, prose), styles, texts and manuscripts (book types, layouts, images) in creating literary links across space and time. Building on the practices of both comparative literature and entangled history, the symposium will open up connections between literary cultures often considered to be separate. At the same time, and of equal importance, it will be alert to the absence of connections, to discontinuities, exposing the diversities and ruptures of medieval literature, as well as the commonalities.
By following the movement of forms and tracing social connections from Antiquity to the Renaissance, we will interrogate both geographies and chronologies of medieval European literature. Always keeping the intersection of the social and the formal in view, the symposium will move back and forth between small and large scales of time and place: the local, the transregional, the European, and the Afro-Eurasian. Issues of morphology, scale and periodization will be central to discussion, enabling conversations across a wide range of material to gain traction. The symposium will bring together methodological and theoretical contributions, addressing the intersection of people and forms; we welcome papers that work on large scale typological models as well as papers that address broader issues though closely-worked case studies.
Questions to consider include:
• How do we move from specific examples to writing/formulating larger narratives, from the micro to the macro, from the close up to the panoramic, without falling into generalizations?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of existing methodologies that account for the movement of objects, texts and people through space (e.g. histoire croisée, actor network theory, global history, etc.)?
• How does medieval Europe fit into a wider Afro-Eurasian space? How does Europe divide into and participate in regional geographies?
• How conscious were medieval people of new forms as a dimension of cultural exchange?
• What role does the modern historical imagination have to play in recreating social networks and formal encounters?
• How do medieval theories of cultural movement (e.g. translatio imperii et studii, spoliation, etc.) enable us to explain the transmission of literary forms?
The symposium will meet over three days, with each day including 3 panels with three speakers. Papers will last 20 minutes and be followed by 45 minutes of discussion per panel. Since the substantial discussion following the papers is as important as the papers themselves, papers will not be allowed to overrun. Each session will have a respondent/moderator who will read papers in advance of the session and launch the discussion of their session through a short reflective invitation. For this reason, we ask that all papers be given in English. Speakers are asked to frame their research in ways which are simultaneously sophisticated and inviting of exchange with colleagues working across the literatures of medieval Europe (including Byzantium, and Islamic Spain and Sicily) and its neighbours. We welcome proposal for individual papers and for panels.
There will be a modest amount of preparatory theoretical reading in advance of the symposium.
We anticipate publishing extended versions of a selection of papers from the workshop in a special issue of Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures.
Venue: The symposium will take place in the Danish Institute at Athens, conveniently located in the Plaka. There are many tavernas, cafes and restaurants nearby.
Cost: There will be no charge to attend the symposium. There will be a charge to cover the cost of the symposium dinner. Delegates are responsible for covering the cost of their travel and accommodation. A small number of bursaries will be available for PhD students and early career scholars, for further information contact Kristin Bourassa (kristin@sdu.dk).
Abstracts: Please send short abstracts (250 words) and a brief CV (1/2 page) to George Younge (george.younge@york.ac.uk) by 1st March 2019. Panel proposals should include overview (100 words) and abstracts and CVs (as above) for all papers.
Call for Papers: Cultural Entanglement, Transfer and Contention in Mediterranean Communities from Antiquity to the Present
Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, 30 May-1 June 2019
Deadline: 15 February 2019
The Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at Central European University and its junior members are proud to announce the forthcoming sixth International Graduate Conference on Cultural Entanglement, Transfer and Contention in Mediterranean Communities.The conference will provide a forum for graduate and advanced undergraduate students working on the Eastern Mediterranean to present their current research, exchange ideas, and develop scholarly networks.
Marking the boundary of three continents, the Mediterranean has been one of the world’s premier zones of cultural interaction since antiquity. From the Romans to the Ottomans, the first caliphs to Queen Victoria, the powers who sought dominance over this sea reckoned with this history of multiplicity by appropriating its rich past and attempting to imitate and outdo their predecessors and contemporaries. Diverse communities, moreover, concomitantly sought to survive and prosper in competition and cooperation with one another. The aim of this conference is to work against the grain of disciplinary boundaries to better understand these processes of inheritance, transmission, and exchange both diachronically and synchronically. How were the cultures of Mediterranean communities particularized through accommodation to, modification of, and divergence from their shared pasts? How did rulers manage these shifting webs of diversity? What procedures drew boundaries between cultures, either successive or contemporary, if and when such lines can be drawn? What evidence and methodologies can be brought to bear to read genuine curiosity, selective accommodation, and outright rejection in these exchanges within and across polities in the Mediterranean?
Young scholars from across the globe will be invited to share their work and come to grips with how to conduct research in an academic environment that increasingly demands both specialized expertise and comparative breadth. We seek innovative proposals by graduate students from all disciplines that relate to the Mediterranean world, including but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Classics, Environmental Science, Gender Studies, History, Languages and Literatures, Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology.
Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:
• The entanglements and diverse heritages of elite artistic, literary, and intellectual cultures
• Rethinking big processes, e.g. Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, and Islamization
• Interaction and diversity in everyday life and popular/vernacular cultures
• Trans-imperial/trans-national subjects, contact zones, gendered boundaries, and porous identities within and beyond borders
• Maintaining common identities in diasporas: the connections and differences between communities across far-flung geographies
• Communities and networks (intellectual, professional, mercantile, civic, military, domestic, etc.) that operate across ethnic and national lines
• Conquest, colonization, environmental change, and shifting landscapes of diversity
• Envisioning pluralism in philosophical, theological, and legal discourses of order
• Intra-communal politics in contexts of social, economic, and gender stratification
• Migration, urban economies, and the transformation of spatial and social structures
• The (re)invention of national communities and their relationship to legacies of difference
• The re-appropriation of imperial pasts in Mediterranean societies
Please submit by February 15, 2019 a short paper proposal (no more than 250 words, together with a brief biography and contact information) to the following address: cemsconference@ceu.edu. Results will be announced on March 4, 2019.
Keynote Speakers
Nicholas Purcell (University of Oxford)
Arietta Papaconstantinou (University of Reading)
Zeynep Türkyilmaz (Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin)
All participants will be offered accommodation for the full duration of the conference (3 nights) at the CEU Residence Center. In order to encourage the participation of individuals with limited institutional support a small number of partial travel grants will be available to cover travel expenses. Those who wish to be considered for the grant should include an additional justification alongside their paper proposals. Please note that there is no conference fee.
In addition, this year the conference will coincide with CEMS’s Undergraduate Open House, and advanced undergraduates interested in pursuing research or academic career in the history and cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean are invited to attend the Open House as well as apply to present a paper at the conference. For further information, do not hesitate to contact the organizers at cemsconference@ceu.edu
For further information, do not hesitate to contact the organizers at cemsconference@ceu.edu or at our Facebook page.
Contact Email: cemsconference@ceu.edu
URL: https://cems.ceu.edu/cems-graduate-conference-2019
Call for Papers: Beyond Eusebius and Augustine: Rethinking Christian Political Thought in Late Antiquity
Postgraduate/Early Career Conference, University of Liverpool, Tuesday 18 June 2019
Deadline: 18 February 2019
Amid the mass of outstanding scholarship on the Christianization of the Roman world in late antiquity (c. 250-700 CE), political thought has been left behind. Even excellent recent accounts tend to fall back on canonical authors (esp. Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine of Hippo), themes (e.g. the relationship between emperor and churchmen), and early to mid-twentieth century accounts (esp. Baynes, Dvornik, Markus). This project seeks to diversify approaches to late ancient Christian political thought by exploring new topics (e.g. the imperial family, the role of the demonic, the influence of ascetic ideology), authors, regions, and languages. Through an international conference bringing together specialists in Classics & Ancient History, Medieval Studies, Byzantine History, and Early Christianity, leading to a collection of path-breaking essays on specific case studies, it aims to stimulate new approaches and lines of inquiry into a central theme in late ancient history.
We invite proposals for c. 20-minute papers on this theme from postgraduate students and early career researchers. Thanks to generous support from the Royal Historical Society, we will be able to pay for UK travel costs and two nights’ hotel accommodation. Papers given at the conference will be considered for publication in a resulting edited volume/special journal issue.
We would particularly invite proposals which speak to one of the following research themes:
(1) Developing a more pluralist conception of Christian ‘political thought’
Possible topics might include: gendered praise and invective; classical political ideals in ascetic/monastic literature; ascetic/monastic visions of earthly government; demonology and diabolical agency; ethnic discourse, ethnography, and visions of the church as an ethnic, supra-ethnic, or anti-ethnic community.
(2) Expanding the canon
We invite paper proposals which consider previously peripheral or understudied authors, languages, and regions of late ancient western Eurasia, to complicate and nuance accounts of the development of Christian political thought in late antiquity.
(3) Christian political ideology ‘in action’
We invite paper proposals which root Christian political culture in the lived experience of governance in the late ancient world, and consider its influence on concrete interactions between bishops, monks, emperors, officials, and their subjects.
If you are interested in presenting, please e-mail an abstract of no more than 500 words to robin.whelan@liverpool.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is Monday 18 February; we will aim to provide responses by the end of February. Please feel free to e-mail any of the organisers with questions.
Organisers
Prof. Richard Flower (Exeter) (R.Flower@exeter.ac.uk)
Dr Meaghan McEvoy (Macquarie) (meaghan.mcevoy@mq.edu.au)
Dr Robin Whelan (Liverpool) (robin.whelan@liverpool.ac.uk)
Confirmed Speakers
Prof. Dame Averil Cameron (Oxford; respondent)
Dr James Corke-Webster (King’s College London)
Dr Gerda Heydemann (Freie Universität Berlin)
Prof. Julia Hillner (Sheffield)
Dr Conor O’Brien (Durham)