OxByzList: The Byzness, 19th October 2025

[Oxford University Byzantine Society]

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THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY BYZANTINE SOCIETY
The Byzness, 19th October 2025
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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 

I'm very pleased to announce that the OUBS has elected a Secretary for the 2025/6 Committee. Nidanu O'Shea, 1st year DPhil in Syriac, now joins the committee after a unanimous vote in an extraordinary meeting held on Tuesday the 7th of October. 

With the full committee now in place, planning for a range of events both familiar and new is well underway. We look forward to sharing further details in the coming weeks. 

All my best, 

Maddie 

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 the listing brief and include all relevant information in the body of the notice. Outside of exceptional circumstances, we only share events once. 

Byzantine Studies Lectures (NHRF), October 2025

Maria Luisa Agati, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata

The Byzantine Studies Lectures of the Institute of Historical Research (National Hellenic Research Foundation) continue on Monday October 20 at 18:00 EET with a hybrid lecture on:

A well-known bibliographer, an unknown grammarian: Zacharias Kallierges (c. 1470­–1524) [in Greek]

The lecture will be hosted by Princeton Athens Center: 3 Timarchou Str. 11634 Athens

Those who wish to attend in person must register following this link:

https://forms.gle/FPa5LaTfuMHbrV9r7

To join via Zoom please follow the link:

https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wevNxuRdTY2BIDdx7tjC9g

 

Hybrid Conference: Centre for Medieval Studies at Ilia State University, Tbilisi, Georgia

The conference will be held on 18–19 October 2025 in a hybrid format, allowing for both in-person participation in Tbilisi and virtual attendance.

We are pleased to invite you to attend the upcoming international conference,

“Christian Relics and Reliquaries from Late Antiquity to the Post-Byzantine Period: Perception and Interpretation,” organized by the Center for Medieval Studies at Ilia State University.

This two-day academic event will bring together scholars, researchers, and graduate students from around the world to explore current developments and interdisciplinary perspectives on the cultural, religious, and artistic significance of Christian relics and their veneration in premodern societies.

To attend the conference virtually, please use the Zoom link provided below: 

https://iliauni-edu-ge.zoom.us/j/83684498236?pwd=ZteIGTxzaKO2AutTmq7P5vF2DwapHe.1
Meeting ID: 836 8449 8236
Passcode: 734961

Venue: October 18, 2025: Ilia State University, Building A, Ligamus Hall, Ilia Chavchavadze Avenue 32, Tbilisi
October 19, 2025: Ilia State University, Building F, Room 303Kakutsa Cholokashvili Avenue 3/5, Tbilisi
Working Language: English
Opening Session: 2:00 PM (Tbilisi time)

2. CALLS FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers: Houses of Knowledge: Circulating Images, Texts, and Technologies across Medieval Eurasia
Edited by Cassandre Lejosne and Adrien Palladino (Aiming for publication in 2027)
This edited volume explores how monasteries, scriptoria, and madrasas shaped the intellectual and artistic landscapes of medieval Eurasia. From Armenian and Georgian monasteries in the highlands of the Caucasus to Islamic centres of learning in Persia and India, these institutionswere far more than sites of study. They were sites of translation, creation, and circulation ofknowledge, technologies, and visual cultures.

Despite their significance, these institutions remain understudied as part of a broader, interconnected network. Often confined within national, linguistic, or religious historiographies, scriptoria, schools, and madrasas have been approached primarily through compartmentalized disciplinary lenses: architectural historians have explored their spatial design and symbolicvocabulary; manuscript scholars have focused on their roles as production sites; and culturalhistorians have traced ideas circulating through these spaces, frequently within narrowly defined religious frameworks—Christian or Islamic, but rarely both in comparative perspective.

This volume seeks to challenge and move beyond these limitations by rethinking the house of learning as a shared institutional archetype across Eurasia. Drawing from art history, archaeology, manuscript studies, intellectual history, and the history of science, the volume offers a series of interdisciplinary case studies that reposition these institutions within broader historical, cultural, and material networks. The Caucasus stands at the heart of this story—not as a remote frontier, but as a pivotal crossroads where Byzantine, Persian, Islamic, and local traditions converged, collided, and gave rise to new cultural syntheses. The volume traces these dynamics eastward, encompassing the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, and the Indian
subcontinent, regions still too often sidelined in conventional narratives of the medieval world.

Houses of learning are considered here not as static institutions but as dynamic spaces where texts, images, and ideas were continually remade. Sacred writings were copied and interpreted,students and scholars crossed linguistic and institutional borders, and patrons mobilised architecture and manuscript culture to assert power or shape new identities. Beyond words, knowledge was produced through material practices—handling books, carving stone,organising space, performing rituals. Illuminated manuscripts, painted walls, and scientific instruments reveal how pedagogy, piety, and cultural contact were embedded
in tangible media. Covering the ninth to fourteenth centuries, the case studies situate monasteries, scriptoria, and madrasas within broader currents of political upheaval, theologicalinnovation, and mobility. Far from isolated, they emerge as laboratories of synthesis andcontestation, central to rethinking Eurasia as a landscape of circulation, encounter, and experiment.

Practical information
 Deadline for title and short abstract: November 1 st 2025
 Deadline for final paper: April 1 st 2026
 Words: 50-60,000 characters (footnotes and spaces included)
Please do not hesitate to contact both Adrien Palladino (adrien.p...@phil.muni.cz) and Cassandre Lejosne (Cassandr...@unil.ch) if you have any inquiries.

CfP: Princeton Symposium on Athonite Collections

Organizers: Julia Gearhart (Visual Resources) and Maria Alessia Rossi (Index of Medieval Art)

We are pleased to announce the CFP for the Symposium The Athonite Collections and Their Challenges: Open Access, Traveling Exhibitions, and Digital Surrogates. The Symposium will take place in Princeton on September 25-26, 2026. 

Mount Athos holds a wealth of treasures that illuminate the expansive social network of the medieval and modern Christian world. This holy peninsula has shaped the history of Greece, the Mediterranean, Europe, and beyond.

This symposium aims to tackle the challenges of studying the Athonite collections and other such religious repositories. These are challenges that restrict scholarly inquiry and therefore limit the development of new perspectives and the full appreciation of the unique collections and the history of the communities themselves. The reservations of monastic communities over the public accessibility and display of their sacred objects are well known and understandable in view of the centuries-old traditions the monasteries are safeguarding. This symposium seeks to find new ways forward in reconciling these conflicting views, addressing questions such as: how could institutions preserve the agency of the monastic community whilst promoting accessibility and scholarship? Could openly accessible digital archives be fostered while still respecting the ownership of the living religious community?

This event is being organized in the context of the Connecting Histories: The Princeton and Mount Athos Legacy project. For this reason, most of the event and the papers will focus on Mount Athos; however, we will also consider papers that bring in comparative material from other communities that deal with similar issues, creating a conversation with the Athonite material.

Proposals for 30-minute papers (in English) should include a title, an abstract (max. 250 words) and a CV, and be sent to gear...@princeton.edu and mar...@princeton.edu by December 20, 2025.

For the full call for papers, visit the website: https://athoslegacy.project.princeton.edu/announcements/

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Madeleine Duperouzel

DPhil in History

President, Oxford University Byzantine Society

byzantin...@gmail.com  

http://oxfordbyzantinesociety.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/oxbyz