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Call for Papers: Eighth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA, 15-17 June 2020

Deadline: 31 December 2019

The deadline for proposal submissions for the Eighth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 15-17, 2020) is fast approaching, so get your abstracts ready! We invite proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and early modern studies. The Symposium is also host to the 47th Annual Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, the longest-running annual conference in North America. Opportunities for undergraduate submissions are also available via the Tirones Mediaevales sessions – see the website for more details.

The plenary speakers for this year will be David Abulafia, of Cambridge University, and Barbara Rosenwein, of Loyola University, Chicago.

The deadline for all submissions is December 31, 2019. Late submissions will be considered if space is available. Decisions will be made in January and the final program will be published in February.

For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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Call for Papers: Military History of the Mediterranean Sea

Thessaloniki, Greece, 19-20 June 2020

Deadline: 28 February 2020

Papers are sought for the Second International Conference on the Military History of the Mediterranean Sea to be held at Thessaloniki on 19 & 20 June 2020.

The Mediterranean has attracted the imagination of modern historians as the epicentre of great political entities like the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, Venetians, and the Spanish and so on. Yet, it seems that the Sea was always on the margins of historical inquiry between monographs on the histories of Europe, the Middle-East and North Africa. That was until the publication of the famous 2-volume work by F. Braudel in 1949 that profoundly shaped the way of understanding of how societies living around the Mediterranean interacted in a single period of history, offering what another great historian has coined it “a horizontal history of the Mediterranean.” This conference aims to offer a rather vertical history of war in the Mediterranean from the early Middle Ages to the early Modern period (c. AD1700), putting the emphasis on the changing face of several of war’s aspects and contexts over time.

This international collaboration between scholars from Istanbul and Thessaloniki aspires to bring Thessaloniki to the forefront of academic attention, by organizing the Second International Conference on the Military History of the Mediterranean Sea, to be hosted at the Byzantine Museum of the Thessaloniki between 19-20 June 2020. We welcome papers that explore any topic related to the study and teaching of the military history of the Mediterranean from late Antiquity and the fall of Rome to the seventeenth century. We especially encourage papers that focus on the conference’s theme of ‘models of military leadership’.

Points of discussion could potentially, but not exclusively, include:
• Secular and ecclesiastical leadership
• Gender and authority
• The social strata of military leaders/commanders
• The role of military ideals and practices in shaping a military leader
• What could make or break a military leader
• The effectiveness of leaders/commanders in the battlefield
• The ‘ideal’ leadership and ‘heroic individualism’
• Divine authority

We would also consider proposals that target more general themes, like:
• Primary sources and their value for the military history of the Mediterranean Sea (c. 400-1700)
• The emergence and consolidation of customs of military obligation
• Strategy, tactics (battle and siege) and logistics in the regional operational theatres
• Naval warfare
• Society at war and the treatment of the defeated
• Evolution of weaponry in regional operational theatres

The deadline for proposals is 12pm (Athens time +2GMT) on February 28, 2020; late requests cannot be accommodated.

A preliminary program will be circulated on March 30. Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a brief CV to the conference organising committee:
• Georgios Theotokis (Lecturer, Ibn Haldun University, georgios.theotokis@ihu.edu.tr)
• Angeliki Delikari (Assist. Prof., Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, adelikar@hist.auth.gr)
• Agathoniki Tsilipakou (Director, Museum of Byzantine Culture of Thessaloniki)
• Halil Berktay (Prof., Ibn Haldun University)
• Andreas Gkoutzioukostas (Assoc. Prof., Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
• Hara Papadopoulou (Gen. Secretary, Byzantine Thessaloniki)
• Dimitrios Sidiropoulos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

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Call for Papers: Performance: Actors, Objects, Spaces

The 8th Annual Koç University Archaeology and History of Art Graduate Research Symposium

Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), Istanbul, Turkey, 26 March 2020

Deadline: 31 December 2019

Koç University’s Department of Archaeology and History of Art (ARHA) is pleased to announce its 8th Annual Graduate Student Research Symposium, which will be held on 26 March 2020 at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), located in Beyoğlu, Istanbul.

The symposium titled Performance: Actors, Objects, Spaces aims to investigate various manifestations of artistic and cultural acts revolving around performance in order to discuss their enduring prevalence and trace their nuances in different spatial, temporal, social, and personal contexts. Outcomes of performances as employed in building identity, constructing gender, expressing self, and defining community will be analyzed. Our definition of performance is broad: it embraces the sacred and the secular, the social and the personal, and the spectacular and the quotidian. Moreover, performativity, or the interdependent relationship between words and actions, emerges as a topic of interest in this framework, owing to its reflections in the arts.

This symposium seeks to bring together a diverse range of perspectives and disciplines concerned with a span of subjects, areas and periods of research converging around the theme of performance in the arts and culture. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Depictions of performance
– Performance and space
– Performance, architecture, and urban planning
– State power, theatricality, ceremonies, and processions
– Imperial and military performances
– Sacred performances, rites, and rituals
– Performing identities
– Performing culture
– Performativity in arts
– Gender as performance
– Performing arts, theatre, dance, spectacles
– Performing music, musicians, musical instruments
– Memory and performance
– Documenting performances
– Staging and restaging performances
– Self-expression through performance
– Intangible cultural heritage and performance
– Performativity in museum studies

Students of archaeology, art history, history, cultural heritage, museum studies and related fields are invited to present research related to Anatolia and its neighboring regions, including the Mediterranean, Aegean, Black Sea, the Balkans, the Levant and the Ancient Near East, from the earliest prehistoric times through the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Classical, Byzantine and Ottoman periods, and into contemporary times.

All graduate students are encouraged to apply, including M.A. and Ph.D. students at any stage of their studies. The conference will be held in English, but we are open to accepting presentations and posters in both English and Turkish. Applicants should submit a 250-word abstract by 31 December 2019 to arhasymposium@gmail.com. Applicants will be notified of their acceptance by the middle of January. For other questions, please contact arhasymposium@gmail.com or visit arhags.ku.edu.tr and www.facebook.com/ARHAsymposium.

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Spring Symposium Call for Communications

University of Birmingham, 28-30 March 2020

Deadline: 3 January 2020

Abstracts are invited for proposals to deliver communications at the 53rd Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, to be held in Birmingham 28-30 March 2020 on the topic of Nature and the Environment. Communications are 12 minutes long, followed by 3 minutes of questions.

Abstracts should be 250 words in length (maximum), and are due by Friday 3 January 2020. Please send to either D.K.Reynolds@bham.ac.uk or L.Brubaker@bham.ac.uk. Successful applicants will be notified mid-January, in order to allow sufficient time to secure visas, if relevant.

Further information about travel and accommodation may be found here: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/bomgs/events/2020/53rd-spring-symposium-of-byzantine-studies.aspx.

The Programme for the Symposium is also available to download (PDF).

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Call for Papers: Theandrites: Byzantine Philosophy and Christian Platonism (284-1453)

International Society of Neoplatonic Studies Conference, Athens, Greece, 10-14 June 2020

Deadline: 1 February 2020

This panel focuses on the reception of Platonism in the Christian philosophy of the Byzantine era (4th-15th centuries), an era marking the creation of a unique dialogue between Hellenic Platonism and the theology of the Church Fathers and Byzantine Christians.

The panel is open to all issues relating to Byzantine Platonism. This includes: Christians in the Greek-speaking East and their relationship to the Latin tradition in the West, as well as the Christian Platonism found in contemporary church fathers, the Greek-speaking Christians in late antique Gaza, Athens, and Alexandria; the philosophical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus, and John Damascene; the later reception of Platonic theories on the soul, time, and eternity, and metaphysics, as well as ritual among Greek Christians and Hellenes. We welcome papers that trace Platonic ideas, terminology, and methodology as they move throughout the Eastern Roman Empire and the Byzantine Orthodox world.

300 word abstract should be sent to Sarah Wear (swear@franciscan.edu) and Frederick Lauritzen (frederick.lauritzen@new.oxon.org). Papers presented in Athens will be published in the series Theandrites: Studies in Byzantine Philosophy and Christian Platonism (284-1453) (after peer review).

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Merchants and Markets in Late Antiquity

Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago, USA, 7-10 January 2021

Deadline: 7 February 2020

We are inviting the submission of abstracts for the organizer-refereed panel ‘Merchants and Markets in Late Antiquity’ at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies. This annual meeting will be held in Chicago from January 7-10, 2021. The deadline for submitting an abstract is February 7, 2020.

A social, cultural, and economic history of work and trade in the later Roman empire remains to be written. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in labour, professions, commerce, and their organization during the Imperial period, while the last two decades have been a remarkably productive time for the study of the Roman economy in general. The resultant scholarship has presented new approaches which have greatly advanced our understanding of both structural and specific characteristics of the economy. The most influential of these has been the adoption of New Institutional Economics (e.g. Scheidel, Morris, and Saller 2007), but there has also been a steady stream of microeconomic studies focusing on the social elements of economic activity (Terpstra 2013; Venticinque 2016; Hawkins 2016) and sociocultural histories of work and professions (e.g. Verboven and Laes 2016). Some of this scholarship has extended into Late Antiquity, though the most influential work remains Wickham’s magisterial Framing the Early Middle Ages (2006). Nevertheless, scholarship on the later Roman world has not yet sought to integrate the economic theories that have reconditioned the way of writing the socio-economic history of the early Roman Empire.

The future of late Roman social and economic history lies in utilizing and adapting innovative approaches to the Roman economy for the study of Late Antiquity. The institutional change for which this period is known offers plentiful opportunities to consider how individual economic actors were affected by structural, religious, and political changes, and the field is ripe for a re-evaluation of the intersection between social norms and the economy.

This panel hopes to bring together scholars from a wide range of subjects and backgrounds, and to solicit abstracts for papers considering a variety of issues and addressing such diverse questions as:

· What awareness did local merchants, craftsmen, and transporters have of wider economic change in Late Antiquity?
· What strategies did these individuals develop to mitigate risk and resolve economic challenges, and are the strategies of Late Antiquity fundamentally different in some way from those used in earlier or later periods?
· Can we speak of market integration or disintegration in Late Antiquity?
· What were the outcomes of state institutional and structural changes to the economy at local and regional levels?
· What effects did the development of new legal and fiscal systems have on the social and political lives of merchants and craftsmen?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted as email attachments to info@classicalstudies.org by February 7, 2020. The title of the email should be the title of the panel. Abstracts should contain a title of the paper, but should not have any information regarding the identity of the submitter. All abstracts for papers will be reviewed anonymously. For enquiries, please email Jane Sancinito (jsancini@oberlin.edu) or John Fabiano (john.fabiano@utoronto.ca).

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Call for Papers: Cappadocia and Cappadocians in the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods

Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, Turkey, May 14-15, 2020

Deadline: 31 December 2019

In scholarly research Cappadocia is known more through Byzantine mural paintings in cave churches at Göreme and Ürgüp from the eighth-ninth centuries to the 13th-century A.D., but the number of studies on Hellenistic and Roman Cappadocia is rather limited. The aim of this symposium is therefore to report on the state of research concerning Cappadocia between the late-fourth century B.C. and mid-seventh century A.D. We warmly invite contributions by scholars and graduate students from a variety of disciplines related to this region. Intended to bring together scholars of archaeology, history, historical geography, epigraphy and other related disciplines in ancient Anatolian studies to discuss a range of issues concerning this region’s archaeology and history, this symposium should be an excellent opportunity to increase our knowledge about this region.

For full details, see the call for papers.

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Call for Papers: Literary connections between the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the Saints’ Lives

First International conference on Early Christian Literature, Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography

Universitat de València, Valencia, Spain, 1-3 July 2020

Deadline: 31 January 2020

The similarities between Early Christian literature and Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography are very clear, since both use identical literary models and motifs in their narrations and are created in a similar ideological and geographical framework.

This connection between the literature from the Early Christian Era (2nd-4th centuries) and Late Antique and Byzantine Hagiography (5th to 15th centuries) are much more significant, if two literary genres such as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles and the Saints’ Lives are studied and perceived as a whole. Thus, in the former one can observe a wide range of literary motifs that will be developed later by Late Antique or Byzantine hagiographers, especially in the Saints’ Lives. In fact, from a global perspective the Early Christian literature dealing with the apostles and their missions could be interpreted as a sort of protohagiography, a clear antecedent of the narrations found later in Hagiography in Late Antiquity or the Byzantine Era.

For these reasons, this conference is aimed at analyzing this literary phenomenon from a multidisciplinary point of view. The sessions of the conference will be focused on the study of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostle –not only the so called “Major”, but also other texts related to this tradition, i.e. the Acts of Philip or the Acts of Xanthippe and Polixena– and the Eastern saints’ lives composed from the 5th century onwards. Among the papers on these topics, discussion on other tradition different than the Greek one, such as the Arabic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Slavonic or Latin, will be very welcome.

For details, see the full call for papers.

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Call for Papers: The Distribution of Economic and Political Power in Ancient Empires

School of Classics, University of St Andrews, 10-11 June 2020

Deadline: 31 January 2020

While the distribution of wealth in modern societies has recently received considerable attention (notably following the recent work of Thomas Piketty), it remains a relatively poorly understood aspect of ancient empires. This is the more unfortunate as the economic top layers played a pivotal role in governing these empires. Administrative posts were generally assigned to wealthy men, while they simultaneously allowed these men to increase their wealth.

This conference aims to explore the distribution of wealth and its mutually constituting relationship with political power for different ancient empires. Modern scholars often assume a simple correlation between political power and wealth. This is illustrated by the pervasive use of social tables (which are based on the socio-political structure of society) to estimate the distribution of wealth. Although economic and political power networks were indeed strongly integrated in many ancient empires and this strong entanglement is further endorsed by our elitist-biased literary sources, detailed studies of premodern economies and administrations reveal a more nuanced relationship between wealth and political power.

Possible topics of papers include, but are not limited to:
· How were wealth and political power distributed?
· How different were these distributions? Did wealth and political power always coincide? Were there power dissonances, i.e. men with economic but no political power or vice versa?
· How and to what extent were economic and political power networks integrated? Were there institutionalised links?
· How could wealth be converted into political power and vice versa?
· How did the political structure influence the process of wealth concentration or vice versa? What role did the centralised government play in the concentration of economic and political power?

Papers can be comparative (comparing different empires/societies), synthetic (on developments in the longue durée) or focus on a particular case study. Papers on any preindustrial empire or society are welcome. The conference language is English. Two bursaries of £100 towards travel expenses and two nights’ accommodation are available for postgraduate speakers. Prospective speakers are invited to send a 300-word abstract to Bart Danon (bd43@st-andrews.ac.uk) by 31 January 2020.

Confirmed speakers: Mirko Canevaro (Edinburgh), Lisa Eberle (Tübingen), Michael Jursa (Vienna), John Weisweiler (Cambridge), Arjan Zuiderhoek (Ghent).

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Call for Papers: Byzantium – Bridge Between Worlds: 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies

Istanbul, Turkey, 23-28 August 2021

Deadline: 15 April 2020

Due to its remarkably long duration, territorial expanse, geographical situation and complex cultural traditions, Byzantium acted as a temporal and spatial bridge connecting different periods, geographical areas, and cultures. Byzantium acted as a transition between ancient, medieval and early modern worlds around the Mediterranean basin, Eurasia and the Near East through reception, appropriation, and innovation. It connected different geographical and cultural spaces through political, economic, material, and cultural networks in many of which it constituted an important node. Centering on the key theme of “Byzantium – Bridge between Worlds,” the 24th International Congress of Byzantine Studies aims to explore this connecting and mediatory role of Byzantium. It also hopes to initiate proposals on bridging interdisciplinary gaps within Byzantine studies and strengthening dialogue with other with other relevant fields.

The Call for Free Communication, Poster and VR Sessions is now open.

The last submission date is 15 April 2020. Each abstract must be no longer than 300 words. Abstracts should be in the same language as that of the paper to be presented during the session. The working languages of the Congress are English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Russian and Turkish. The participants shall present papers of no longer than 15 minutes each.

Conveners and speakers can participate in no more than 2 sessions during the Congress (including round tables, poster/VR sessions, and thematic free communication/free communication sessions, but excluding plenary sessions).

To submit an abstract, see here.

The abstracts will be included in the program only after the registration payment. 3 April 2021 is the last date for registration payment. For registration please follow this link.