The Byzness, 3rd November 2024
Oxford University Byzantine Society
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THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY BYZANTINE SOCIETY
The Byzness, 3rd November 2024
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1.
NEWS AND EVENTS
2. CALLS FOR PAPERS
3. JOBS AND SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
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27th OUBs International Graduate Conference
For those who may have missed it, last week we announced the call for papers for this academic year’s OUBs Graduate Conference entitled: “Byzantium and its environment.”
For those graduate students interested in participating and showcasing their research that touches upon nature and the environment during the Late Antique and Byzantine period please see the call for papers here.
1. NEWS AND EVENTS
Online Lecture: Re-Imagining Jerusalem: The Ritual Recreation of Pilgrimage between Syria and Georgia (Mary Jaharis Center)
Friday, November 15, 2024 | 12:00 PM (EST, UTC -5) | Zoom
Re-Imagining Jerusalem: The Ritual Recreation of Pilgrimage between Syria and Georgia
Emma Loosley Leeming, University of Exeter
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 2024–2025 East of Byzantium lecture series.
Pilgrimages to the Holy Land are a well-documented phenomenon of Late Antique Christian belief and we are accustomed to reading about the experience of walking in the footsteps of Christ through the testimony of early witnesses such as Egeria. After the Islamic conquests and the loss of Jerusalem to the Arabs, there were periods when it became more difficult to undertake such travels and by the Middle Ages the concept of pilgrimage was re-framed so that it could also mean an interior journey undertaken by a meditative process such as the navigation of the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral.
However, across the Middle East and Caucasus, liturgical texts and rare poorly-understood survivals of early liturgical furniture suggest a range of processes for re-imagining Jerusalem both within churches or by imprinting the loca sancta upon a wider regional landscape. This lecture will introduce some of the ways that believers recreated the rituals of Jerusalem pilgrimage without leaving their hometowns and villages. It will introduce examples from Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and encourage future research in this widely under-studied area of ritual practice.
Emma Loosley Leeming studied at the University of York, the Courtauld Institute of Art and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, where she specialised in the art, architecture and liturgy of Late Antique Syria. She then spent several years living and working at the Monastery of St. Moses the Abyssinian (Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi) in Nebek, Syria, during which time she founded and directed the Dayr Mar Elian Archaeological Project in nearby Qaryatayn. From 2004–2013 she was lecturer in Middle Eastern Art and Architecture at the University of Manchester, before moving to the University of Exeter (2013–) where since 2019 she has been Professor of Middle Eastern and Caucasian Christianities. From 2012–2017 she held a European Research Council grant that enabled her to explore the relationship between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity and is currently working on a book with a Georgian colleague examining the origins and development of Georgian ‘three-church’ basilicas.
Advance registration required. Register here.
Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjc...@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.
Workshop on Byzantino-Slavonic Hagiography (11 December, Leuven)
A Workshop on Byzantino-Slavonic Hagiography in Francis J. Thomson's Card Index (ThISTL) (De Valk, room 1.08, Tiensestraat 41, Leuven)
On December 11. the Leuven Greek Department will host a workshop on Byzantino-Slavonic hagiography, featuring the launch of the OA database of the Hagiography section of ThISTL, the Thomson Index of Slavonic Translation Literature. The event is linked to two ongoing research projects, (1) the Cologne/Leuven collaborative project ‘The Bible in Middle Byzantine Hagiography (8th–10th century)’ (PIs Claudia Sode & Reinhart Ceulemans), and (2) the Innsbruck/Leuven WEAVE project on The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy (PIs Jürgen Fuchsbauer & Reinhart Ceulemans and Lara Sels). (Program attached)
For more information contact Lara Sels: lara...@kuleuven.be
Attendance is free but registration is required. You can register by sending an email to Ms Evelyne Diels: evelyn...@kuleuven.be
Please indicate the sessions you will attend (1, 2, 3 or the whole day), and whether or not you will join us for lunch.
2. CALLS FOR PAPERS
Entangled Christianities (100-1500 CE)
We are pleased to inform you that the international conference Entangled Christianities (100-1500 CE) will take place from 24 to 26 November 2025 at the Orthodox Academy of Crete (Kolymbari, Chania, Greece).
This conference explores the diverse manifestations of global Christianities from the early first to the mid-second Millennium CE and its “entanglement” with diverse local cultures and contexts. For example, what did it mean to be Christian in medieval Kiev? What enabled Christians in the Middle East to maintain their faith identity under Muslim domination? To what extent did Christianity lend a sense of homogeneity to its practitioners through its eclectic nature and vast global reach? We invite papers dealing with the theme of “entanglement” and the complex influences, interactions, and intersections within and between different varieties of global Christianity across the period 100–1500. The history of Christianity is not a monolithic narrative but a tapestry woven from diverse threads of doctrine, theology, practice, and belief. Entangled Christianities aims to unravel the individual threads that form this complex tapestry to gain a more nuanced understanding of the overall makeup of historical Christianity in its global contexts.
Read more here.
We hope to see you in beautiful Crete!
Poetry, prosody and pragmatics: linguistic insights from/on verse in Indo-European traditions
As has long been recognised, the word order of ancient Indo-European languages cannot be accounted for in purely syntactic terms. Over the last few decades, compelling arguments have been presented, cross-linguistically, for the importance of constituents’ pragmatic values in determining their placement, and still more recently the realisation has been growing that prosody, rather than linear order per se, plays a crucial role in the expression of information structure. Prosody, however, is not systematically encoded in writing, which makes it largely inaccessible in the study of languages no longer spoken. Now, poetry can arguably be viewed as a prosodically stylised form of language, and although it is clear that prosody evidenced in verse does not have a one-to-one correspondence to that of ‘ordinary’ language, the underlying idea of our workshop is that prosody-related phenomena in verse can better be understood if considered from a linguistic perspective and can in turn shed light on the prosody of the relevant language in general.
The workshop is being organised within the framework of the SFI-IRC-funded research project Enjambement in Latin Poetry: Prosody, Pragmatics and Word Order, which takes verse-breaks as prima facie evidence for the prosodic segmentation of Latin. With the workshop, we hope to expand the scope of exploration, by both considering other prosodic features of the verse form and by taking into account other poetic traditions. The Homeric poems have already generated a considerable body of relevant research, and we would particularly welcome contributions that go beyond that corpus and/or offer a comparative perspective, including both later Greek and Latin poetry and poetry in other extinct Indo-European languages.
The workshop will take place on the 19–20 June 2025 at the Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin.
Organisers: Boris Kayachev, Anna Chahoud.
Confirmed speakers: Rutger Allan (VU Amsterdam), Nicolas Bertrand (Côte d’Azur), Concepción Cabrillana (Santiago de Compostela), Martine Cuypers (TCD), Wolfgang de Melo (Oxford), Mark Janse (Cambridge), Ahuvia Kahane (TCD), Götz Keydana (Göttingen), Eoin Mac Cárthaigh (TCD), Olga Spevak (Toulouse).
If you are interested in contributing a paper, please submit an abstract of up to 300 words to PoetryProso...@gmail.com by Saturday 30 November; we will notify you of the outcome by the end of the year.
Is there no possible consolation? Paradoxes, limits and failures of a controversial concept from Antiquity to the present day
The conference will take place at Paul Valéry University Montpellier 3, September 25-27th 2025
Proposals in either English, French, and Italian (between 200 and 300 words), accompanied by a short CV, should be sent, before January 15, 2025 , to the organizing committee at: colloqueconsol...@gmail.com
Please find the more detailed call for papers here (in both French and English).
3. JOBS AND SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
Call for Applications: Postdoctoral Researcher (PALIMXRF project in Paris)
Please find here the full call for applications for a 12-month full-time position as postdoctoral researcher in the PALIMXRF project in Paris.
The PALIMXRF project aims to apply multispectral and X-ray fluorescence imaging technology to the decipherment of the erased texts in several palimpsest manuscripts. The postdoctoral researcher will use their excellent philological and paleographical skills to lay the groundwork of deciphering the manuscript and to serve as the interface between the various participants in the project.
Qualified applicants are invited to send a cover letter and CV to victor.g...@cnrs.fr, by November 4th, 2024.
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Alexander Johnston
MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies
President, Oxford University Byzantine Society
http://oxfordbyzantinesociety.wordpress.com