The Byzness, 31st May 2026
Oxford University Byzantine Society
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THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY BYZANTINE SOCIETY
The Byzness, 31st May 2026
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1. NEWS AND EVENTS
2. CALLS FOR PAPERS
3. JOBS AND SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
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1. NEWS AND EVENTS
Dear all,
With term ending and summer approaching, I hope all is going well. Good luck to those students undertaking coursework and examinations, and congratulations to all who have completed or submitted so far!
A reminder for all student members of the OUBS that elections are taking place on Thursday, June 4th, from 3-4pm. We hope to see as many of you as possible.
Remember to follow us on all our socials, below!
Instagram: @oxbyzsoc
Bluesky: @oxunibyzantinesoc.bsky.social
X/Twitter: @oxbyz (if you do follow us on X, we are transitioning over to Bluesky, so please do follow us there in the first instance)
All my best,
Madeleine.
For those wishing to submit an event, call for papers, job or scholarship opportunity to the Byzness please send details to the committee at byzantin...@gmail.com indicating the relevant list for The Byzness our external to Oxford and year-round newsletter or The Byzantine Lists our Oxford-centered events and circulated only in term-time. Please keep listing brief and include all relevant information in the body of the notice. Outside of exceptional circumstances, we only share events once.
Transmitting and Preserving Languages in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Second International Workshop.
Thursday 4 June 2026.
Balliol College, Gillis Lecture Theatre, 09:00–17:00.
Speakers: Marina Bazzani (University of Oxford); Valentina Calzolari (University of Geneva); Benedetta Contin (Austrian Academy of Sciences); Andrea Cuomo (Ghent University); Karen Hamada (University of Tokyo); Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago); Markéta Kulhánková (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic).
Conveners: Daniel Gallaher and Ugo Mondini
Chairs: Alice Rio, Theo Maarten van Lint and Stratis Papaioannou
This event is co-sponsored by the Balliol Interdisciplinary Institute (BII), the John Fell Fund (TORCH Network Poetry in the Medieval World), the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA), and the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research (OCBR).
No pre-registration is required for in-person or online attendance. Please do feel free to circulate the programme and the Microsoft Teams link below.
Microsoft Teams meeting
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/338721105455048?p=PE15pFgsqS85hqZj6B
Meeting ID: 338 721 105 455 048
Passcode: T2xN9by2
Transmitting and Preserving Languages in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Exhibition and Manuscript Workshop.
Friday, 5th June 2026.
Weston Library, Horton Room, 9:00–11:00.
Exhibition and workshop on Greek and Armenian Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries.
Organisers: Nina Sietis (University of Cassino and Southern Lazio) and David Zakarian (California State University, Fresno), in collaboration with: Nicholas Kontovas, Péter Toth (Bodleian Libraries), Ugo Mondini and Daniel Gallaher
Advanced registration is required for this session. Please contact ugo.m...@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk to register.
Transmitting and Preserving Languages in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean. Second International Workshop
Date: 4 June 2026
Venue: Balliol College, Gillis Lecture Theatre and Massey Room (Oxford OX1 3BJ) & online
Convenors: Daniel Gallaher and Ugo Mondini (University of Oxford)
Speakers: Marina Bazzani (University of Oxford); Valentina Calzolari (University of Geneva); Benedetta Contin (Austrian Academy of Sciences); Andrea Cuomo (Ghent University); Karen Hamada (University of Tokyo); Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago); Markéta Kulhánková (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
For more information: https://www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/events/2026/june/04/transmitting-and-preserving-languages-medieval-and-early-modern-mediterranean
TeTra Book in the Spotlight, Thursday 4 June, 4 pm CET, with Christine Shepardson and Philip Michael Forness
Christine Shepardson (The University of Tennessee Knoxville) will present her recently published book A Memory of Violence: Syriac Christianity and the Radicalization of Religious Difference in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2026), and the discussant will be Philip Michael Forness (KU Leuven).
The event will take place on Zoom. If you're not yet on our mailing list and wish to attend this paper, please get in touch with me or one of your other hosts – Andy Hilkens, Marion Pragt, or Dan Batovici – to receive the link. Please find below the book synopsis from the publisher’s website:
Through the fifth and sixth centuries, major divisions rocked Christianity as different factions vied to make their teachings the doctrine of the Roman Empire’s imperial church. In the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, miaphysite Christians, often targeted as heretics by the imperial church, confronted periodic violence and persecution. In this book, Christine Shepardson reshapes our understanding of late antiquity by centering Syriac Christianity in these complex and politicized doctrinal conflicts. Drawing on critical studies of violence and memory, she traces narratives of resistance and other rhetorical strategies by which miaphysite leaders radicalized their followers to endure physical deprivation and harm rather than abandon their church community.
About our speakers:
Christine Shepardson is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is author of Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy and Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria.
Philip Michael Forness is BOF Associate Professor of eastern Christianity in the Research Unit History of Church and Theology in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, KU Leuven. He is the author of Preaching Christology in the Roman Near East and Jacob of Serugh: Homily on the Apostle Thomas and the Resurrection of Our Lord.
Feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested, and to get in touch with your hosts!
The general programme of the TeTra Seminar is available at https://tetra.univie.ac.at/. We are also on Facebook and Bluesky. Recordings of talks and lectures are available on our Youtube channel.
Land and Power in the Later Roman World (Tübingen, 29 June–1 July 2026)
We are pleased to announce that the programme for the conference “Land and Power in the Later Roman World” is now available.
The conference will take place from 29 June to 1 July 2026 at Schloss Hohentübingen (Fürstenzimmer), Tübingen.
The aim of the conference is to re-examine the links between land and power between 300 and 600 CE in their legal, socio-economic, and material dimensions. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines and academic traditions, we will survey recent academic developments in this area of research and hope to obtain a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework for understanding land ownership in this period.
Conference Programme
Monday, 29 June 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer
· 9:00-9:30 Welcome
· 9:30-9:45 Opening Remarks
Session I: Political economies of landownership
· 9:45-10:30 Alberto Dalla Rosa — Land, status and loyalty: the politics of land grants to individuals from Augustus to the Severans.
· 10:30–11:15 John Weisweiler — Imperial fiscality and senatorial property in the fourth century.
· 11:15-11:45 Coffee Break
· 11:45–12:30 Sophie Kovarik — Arsinocrats: aristocratic landownership in late antique Fayyum.
· 12:30–13:15 Damián Fernandez — Land and power in post–imperial Hispania: royal gifts and the politics of ownership.
· 13:15–14:45 Lunch
Session II: Ecclesiastical economies
· 14:45–15:30 Simona Tarozzi — Imperial law and ecclesiastical administration in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: land management in Ravenna and the prefecture of Gallia and Ravenna (4th – 8th centuries).
· 15:30–16:15 Francesco Verrico — Emphyteusis on Church lands: how ecclesiastical practice (re)shaped a legal institution.
· 16:15–16:45 Coffee Break
· 16:45–17:30 Roy Flechner — Distributive justice on the sixth–century Sicilian papal patrimony.
· 17:30–18:15 Paulo Pachá — Land, power and labor: property and asymmetrical dependence in Visigothic Iberia.
· 19:30 Conference dinner
Tuesday, 30 June 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer
Session III: The dynamics of conflict
· 09:00–09:45 Pierfrancesco Porena — Land and power: the rise and fall of the Ostrogoths in Italy.
· 09:45–10:30 Ian Bonze — The economy of power: debt and land disputes in Late Antiquity.
· 10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
· 11:00–11:45 Giordana Franceschini — Governing land through conflict: invasio and élite competition in the later Roman World (4th–6th c.).
· 11:45–12:30 Konstantin Schönleber — In fraudem legum adversariorumque terrorem. The (ab)use of social status in late Roman land litigation.
· 12:30–14:00 Lunch
Session IV: Small-world economies
· 14:00–14:45 Paolo Tedesco — Living at the margins: afterthoughts on African peasants in an age of extremes, 300–900 CE.
· 14:45–15:30 Eugenia Vitello — Fields for shepherds? Socioeconomic leverage of herdsmen in land disputes within late antique Anatolia.
· 15:30–16:00 Coffee Break
· 16:00–16:45 James Burns — Small fields and status in late antique Gaul: towards the slaves’ economy.
· 16:45–17:30 Kevin Hoogeveen — The fragile power of Byzantine landowners: foregrounding the influence of rural Egyptians in the fifth to seventh centuries AD.
Keynote in combination with the Kolloquium des Seminars für Alte Geschichte
· 18:00-19:30 Paul du Plessis – Land and imperial rhetoric in the Theodosian Code.
· 20:00 Conference dinner
Wednesday, 1 July 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer
Session V: Notions of property and their social context
· 09:00–09:45 Becca Grose — Co–owning land in the late Roman West: a social and political perspective, 300–600 AD.
· 09:45–10:30 Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner — Notions of property and the political economy of the later empire.
· 10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
· 11:00–11:45 Carlos Machado — Defining property from the ground up: Italy, 300–600.
· 11:45–12:30 Ralph Mathisen — Landholding and power on the ground: social network analysis and the Tablettes Albertini.
· 12:30–13:00 Concluding Remarks
The conference language will be English.
Attendance is open to all interested colleagues and students, and we would be delighted to welcome attendees from related fields. The conference will be held in person only and no registration is required.
This conference is part of the AHRC-DFG funded project “Land and Loyalty: the politics of land in the late Roman world” (https://research.st-andrews.ac.uk/landloyalty/), directed by Profs. Carlos Machado (St Andrews) and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner (Tübingen).
For enquiries and further information, please contact Dr Giordana Franceschini: giordana.f...@histsem.uni-tuebingen.de
Save the Date: June 27-July 1, 2027
Vanderbilt University invites scholars and the public to participate in the 10th North American Syriac Symposium in Nashville, Tennessee on June 27-July 1, 2027.
Held every 4 years since 1991, the North American Syriac Symposium (NASS) brings together scholars and students for exchange and discussion on a wide variety of topics related to the language, literature, and cultural history of Syriac, extending chronologically from the first centuries CE to the present day and geographically from the Middle East and South India to China and the contemporary worldwide diaspora.
In June of 2026, we will publish further details on how to submit paper proposals and registration information for NASS 2027. For the present, please save these dates if you plan to attend: June 27-July 1, 2027.
Please join us in Nashville in 2027!
conférences Petra Sijpesteijn Collège de France 2-23 juin 2026
Petra Sijpesteijn, professeure à l'université de Leyde, donnera quatre conférences au Collège de France (11 place Marcelin-Berthelot, 75015 Paris) du 2 au 23 juin 2026 sur le thème "Réparer les torts : justice et redressement en Égypte médiévale" (https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/agenda/conferencier-invite/reparer-les-torts-justice-et-redressement-en-egypte-medievale):
• Mardi 2 juin 2026 :
"Des pétitions aux lettres : un système d’appel intégré”
• Mercredi 10 juin 2026 :
"Faire passer son message : aspects pratiques de la rédaction de lettres"
- Mardi 16 juin 2026 :
- "Valeurs partagées”
- • Mardi 23 juin 2026 :
- "Attentes et écarts ; règles et variations”
2. CALL FOR PAPERS
CfP: British Archaeological Association postgraduate conference - deadline 31 July 2026
We are excited to announce that the next BAA postgraduate conference will take place online on Thursday, 26 November 2026.
We are inviting proposals by postgraduate and early career researchers in the field of medieval art history, architecture and archaeology. Papers can be on any aspect of the medieval period, from antiquity to the Later Middle Ages, across all geographical regions. Proposals of around 250 words for a 20-minute paper, along with a CV, should be sent by 31 July 2026 to postgr...@thebaa.org.
Workshop on Letters and Epistolary Culture in Syriac Christianity at the International Conference on Patristic Studies Oxford, 2-6 August 2027
The research group on “Syriac Epistolography” at KU Leuven is organizing a workshop on letters and epistolary culture in Syriac Christianity at the 2027 Oxford Patristics conference.
We are issuing a call for papers that investigate letters and letter writing in Syriac Christian communities, including translations of letters into Syriac, across the first millennium CE. Proposals are particularly invited in relation to three themes: (1) the principal actors involved in Syriac epistolary culture, from authors, recipients, scribes, patrons, and letter carriers to persons greeted, thanked, corrected, or otherwise addressed within letters; (2) the exchange of knowledge and the mobility of people, objects, languages, and ideas evidenced by Syriac letters; and (3) the circulation, collection, and transmission of Syriac letters, including in manuscripts, and the formation of epistolary corpora.
The aim of the workshop is to integrate Syriac letters into the growing study of letters in the ancient world (e.g., Allen and Neil 2020; Riehle 2020; Becker, Egelhaaf-Gaiser, and Fürst 2025) and to further our understanding of late antique Christian epistolary cultures across linguistic, political, and confessional boundaries. Various contexts in which letters were composed, received, read, and collected (e.g., monasteries, schools, episcopal sees, cities) as well as diverse epistolary genres may be addressed. Papers may employ both more traditional and newer methodologies and may focus on formal characteristics and conventions of late antique letters as well as on their contents and reception.
Abstracts: Please submit a title and abstract (up to 250 words) by 30 June 2026. Please send your submissions and any questions to Marion Pragt (marion...@kuleuven.be). The workshop organizers will review submissions and will notify applicants by 31 July 2026. (If your abstract is not accepted as part of the workshop, you should still have time to submit it as a short communication through the general submission on the conference website.)
The research group on “Syriac Epistolography” at KU Leuven comprises the following members: David Copan (Doctoral Researcher), Philip Michael Forness (PI), Marion Pragt (Post-Doc/Project Coordinator), and Karolina Tomczyszyn (Doctoral Researcher).
3. JOBS AND SCHOLARSHIP OPPORTUNITIES
FIAS Call for applications Deadline approaching! French Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme 2027-2028
The French Institutes for Advanced Study Fellowship Programme offers 10-month fellowships at the seven Institutes of Aix-Marseille, Cergy, Loire Valley (Orléans-Tours), Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Paris. It welcomes applications from high-level international scholars to develop their innovative research projects in France.
For the 2027-2028 academic year, FIAS offers 29 fellowship positions: Aix-Marseille (7), Cergy (3), Loire Valley Orléans-Tours (2), Lyon (3), Montpellier (2), Nantes (4), Paris (8).
The FIAS Fellowhip Programme is open to all disciplines in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) and to all other research fields interfacing with the SSH. Applicants are strongly encouraged to consult the webpages of the host Institutes for Advanced Study (IAS) to learn more about their specific scientific priorities, areas of focus, and institutional partners, as these should be carefully considered before applying.
FIAS fellows will benefit from the support and stimulating scientific environment offered by the IAS, characterized by a multidisciplinary cohort of fellows and strong connections to local research centers and laboratories. They will be free to organize their work and conduct research according to their own priorities and interests.
CONDITIONS
All IAS have agreed on common standards, including the provision of a living allowance (2,200€ per month), social security coverage, accommodation, a research and training budget, plus coverage of travel expenses.
ELIGIBILITY
FIAS awards fellowships to outstanding researchers of all career levels, from postdoctoral researchers to senior scientists. The minimum requirement is a PhD + 2 years of research experience at the time of the application (PhD training period will not be considered in the calculation of experience).
Researchers from all countries are eligible to the FIAS Fellowship Programme but they must have spent no more than 12 months in France during the three years prior to the application deadline.
APPLICATION
Applications are submitted online via www.fias-fp.eu where you will find detailed information regarding the content of the application, eligibility criteria and selection procedure.
Application deadline: June 25th, 2026 - 6:00 pm (Paris, France time)
SELECTION
The scientific selection is highly competitive, merit-based and conducted through an international independent peer review.
- July 2026: Eligibility Check
- August - November 2026: Peer review process
- December 2026: Preselection by the FIAS Selection Committee
- January - February 2027: Selection by IAS Scientific Advisory Boards
- March 2027: Communication of results
For more general information on the FIAS Fellowship Programme, please consult our website: www.fias-fp.eu
Royal Historical Society Funding Opportunities
Available to members of the Royal Historical Society at a range of career stages.
Postgraduate and Early Career Research Support Grants, due on Friday, June 5th 2026.
Collaborative Grants, due on Friday, June 5th.
Teaching Fellowship, due on Friday, July 10th.
Funded Book Workshop Grants, due on Friday, July 10th.
See here for more information: https://royalhistsoc.org/new-calls-for-research-funding-from-the-royal-historical-society-opening-in-march-2026/
Applications for the RHS Master’s Scholarships
RHS Master’s Scholarships provide financial support to students from groups currently underrepresented in academic History. Each Scholarship is worth £5,000.
Applications for this scheme are in two stages:
Stage 1, to confirm the eligibility of applications, runs from Monday 20 April 2026 to Friday 5 June 2026.
Stage 2, to assess personal statements from eligible applicants, runs from Monday 15 June 2026 to Friday 10 July 2026.
Applications for Stage 1 are now invited via the Society’s applications portal.
The programme, established in 2022, seeks to actively address underrepresentation within the discipline, and enable Black and Asian students, along with those of other minorities, to consider academic research in History.
By supporting Master’s students the programme focuses on a key early stage in the academic training of future researchers. With these Scholarships, we seek to support students who are without the financial means to study for a Master’s in History. By doing so, we hope to improve the educational experience of early career historians engaged in a further degree.
There are no conditions on what the award may be spent and may be used to support fees, living expenses etc. during the degree course. Recipients also become Postgraduate Members of the Society.
Before beginning an application for a Scholarship, please read the following guide to ensure you meet the required eligibility requirements.
Institute of Historical Research Fellowships
The IHR’s Fellowship Programme provides a home for researchers conducting historical projects and offers a formal IHR affiliation for those who will benefit from a period of time embedded within the IHR community and who wish to contribute to that community. Our Fellows are often non-affiliated historians, overseas visitors, or researchers working in other parts of the history world such as public history or museums and archives. Our overarching purpose in providing a Fellowship Programme is to facilitate the research activities of mutually supportive researchers.
Please note that The IHR Fellowship replaces our previous fellowship schemes: Senior, Associate and Alumni.
Applications are currently open with a deadline of 30th June 2026.
For more information, see here: https://www.history.ac.uk/fellowships-funding/non-funded-fellowships/ihr-fellowship
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Madeleine Duperouzel
DPhil in History
President, Oxford University Byzantine Society
http://oxfordbyzantinesociety.wordpress.com