The 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies will be held on 24 to 29 August 2026 in Vienna, Austria.

Dear Colleagues,

Following the online meeting of the Organizing Committee of the 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies -Vienna 2026 with the members of the AIEB Bureau on 16 March 2023, we would like to inform you about the preliminary profile and structure of the Congress program and to appeal to all National Committees to send us their proposals for Round Tables by 31 December 2023. The call for Free Communications will be sent in spring 2025. You may find below the main theme of the Congress, the themes of six Plenary Sessions, as well as the timetable and procedures for Round Tables, to be confirmed and approved at the Inter Congress meeting in Athens on 12 April 2024.

INFORMATION ON THE PROFILE AND STRUCTURE OF THE 25th CONGRESS OF BYZANTINE STUDIES- Vienna 2026

Date:

The 25th International Congress of Byzantine Studies will be held on 24 to 29 August 2026 in Vienna, Austria.

Main Theme:

“Byzantium beyond Byzantium”, “Byzance au-delà de Byzance”, “Το Βυζάντιο πέρα από το Βυζάντιο”

General Rule:

Scholars can participate in no more than two sessions throughout the Congress. (i.e., as speaker in two sessions, or as speaker in one session plus as convener, or as convener in two sessions).

Plenary Sessions:

There will be six Plenary Sessions. The list of Plenary Session themes and speakers will be approved at the Inter-Congress meeting in Athens on 12 April 2024. National Committees will be informed about the details shortly before the meeting. The themes for Plenary Sessions are:

1. Byzantium lost and found

2. Romanitas beyond Byzantium. Diffusion and impact of ideas of Rome in a „post-Roman”

   world

3. The beasts, the crops and the bones. Biological perspectives on the Byzantine world

4. Byzantine Diversities

5. Reading Byzantine literature across the centuries

6. Byzantium in Central Europe

Round Tables:

General rules

1. Round Tables must be proposed through the National Committee of the proposer. There is also the option of joint proposals by more than one National Committee.

2. Round Tables are allocated 90 minutes. They should consist of no fewer than four and no more than six speakers, plus the convener(s), in order to ensure adequate time for discussion.

3. The professional affiliation of the speakers should represent at least two countries. We particularly encourage the inclusion of young researchers.

4. We strongly encourage those who propose Round Tables to follow the Congress main theme.

5. The most important criterion for accepting a Round Table proposal will be its innovative scholarly contribution.

6. The number of proposals, including joint proposals by each National Committee is limited to ten.

7. Proposals should include a title, an abstract of 250 words, 5 key words, the names of the convener(s) and speakers as well as the name of the person sending the proposal, his/her affiliated institution and his/her mail address.

8. Proposals should be written in English or French. Timetable

• The deadline for submission of Round Table proposals by National Committees to the Organizing Committee is 31 December 2023. Any Round Table proposal sent after the deadline will not be accepted. The proposals should be sent to program.ICBS2026@univie.ac.at.
• Conveners of Round Tables will be informed about the decision of the Program Committee (in accordance with the Bureau of the AIEB) in mid-February 2024. Proposed Round Tables will either be accepted or rejected or the option of an Organized Session will be offered.
• Conveners of accepted Round Tables will be asked to confirm their participation and the organization of their Round Tables by 31 March 2024.
• The list of Round Tables will be presented at the Inter-Congress meeting in Athens on 12 April 2024.

Vienna, March 2023
The Organizing Committee

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The officers of UCLA MEMSA  announce this year’s conference, “Frontiers, Borders, & Borderlands in the Early Global World,” to be held in the UCLA Humanities Seminar Room, 306 Royce Hall, on June 2, 2023, as a hybrid event. MEMSA invites submissions from graduate students in any discipline of medieval and early modern studies, at UCLA and beyond. Abstracts of 250 words are due April 10. Please email them to memsa.ucla@gmail.com. Acceptances will be sent by April 20. More information at https://cmrs.ucla.edu/memsa/cfp-frontiers-borders-borderlands-in-the-early-global-world/

 The Israeli Forum of Early Medieval Studies and Utrecht University invite PhD students to submit their proposals for a Ph.D. Student Workshop "Textual Communities in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: Formation, Influence, and Afterlife." 

The aim of this workshop is to open up the discussion of textual communities in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. We welcome speakers from various disciplines, studying varying periods and religions (such as late-antique Judaism, early Islam, and Eastern, Western, and Syriac Christianity). 

We will offer partial financial support to a few select students.

Please find further information in the attached document.

The workshop will be held in Jerusalem on 5-7 September 2023. 

Deadline for proposals: April 23rd, 2023

Interested students are requested to send an abstract (max. 250 words) and a short CV (max. 1 page) to FEMS@mail.huji.ac.il. 

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———

Best regards,

Shachar F. Orlinski
Ph.D. Candidate, 
Department of History, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Israeli Forum of Early Medieval Studies

shachar.orlinski@mail.huji.ac.il
s.f.orlinski@berkeley.edu

 

Outcasts, Pariahs, and Criminals: Midwest World History Association 2023 Conference's Call for Proposals

by Jeanne E. Grant

Outcasts, Pariahs, and Criminals: Histories of Others and Othering

Call for Proposals

The Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Midwest World History Association

September 22-23, 2023

Roosevelt University (Chicago, IL)

Proposal Deadline: May 15, 2023

The Midwest World History Association is pleased to announce a call for paper, poster, panel, roundtable, and workshop proposals for its annual conference to be held at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois on September 22-23, 2022. The conference theme is “Outcasts, Pariahs, and Criminals: Histories of Others and Othering.” This theme builds off of last year’s “Difficult Histories” by highlighting the histories of and by those who have been othered. As many political leaders move to “shield people from feeling ‘discomfort’ over historic actions by their race, nationality or gender,” this theme is intended to invite presentations and discussions on how world historians at all levels – high school, community college, or university - can best create spaces within which to explore, share, teach and learn about contested topics. This year’s theme is also a recognition of the change in federal law that once again makes incarcerated citizens eligible for Pell grants and the hopeful increase of educational opportunities for those most impacted by the carceral state. As always, while designed to spark discussion, the conference theme is not intended to limit possibilities: paper and panel proposals on any theme and time period in world history are welcome. Similarly, proposals that focus on teaching and those that showcase research are equally encouraged. The MWWHA seeks to bring together college and K-12 faculty, and welcomes proposals from K-12 teachers, college faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, high school students, and public historians, as well as scholars and teachers working in allied fields.

This conference will be held in person at Roosevelt University in Chicago’s South Loop.

Please submit a 250-word proposal abstract and short CV to http://www.mwwha.org by May 15, 2023.

Questions about the conference can be directed to MWWHA's public discussion forum on its site, or you can email the conference chair at chair@mwwha.org. Where a complete panel of papers, roundtable, or workshop is proposed, the convener should also include a 250-word abstract of the panel theme. Individual paper presentations should be planned to last no longer than 20 minutes.

The MWWHA will offer up to three competitive Graduate Student Awards to help offset travel costs. Graduate students interested in applying should include a letter with their conference proposal explaining how the conference helps them with their studies, teaching, and/or future career plans as well as how their paper fits with the conference theme and the mission of the MWWHA.

We also invite accepted papers to be submitted to our journal, The Middle Ground Journal, for potential publication: http://themiddlegroundjournal.org/. Extra consideration will be given to papers for a special issue of the journal based on the conference theme.

Further information about the MWWHA, including membership and conference registration (when it becomes available), can be found at http://www.mwwha.org.

 CfP: Dissolving Kinship in the Early Middle Ages, ca. AD 400-1000

The University of York, 1-2 June 2023

Confirmed external participants: Catherine Cubitt (UEA); Erin Dailey (Leicester), Rachel Stone (Bedfordshire & KCL),

Kinship is often treated as a social phenomenon that binds people together permanently through the creation of mutual ties, obligations, and emotions between individuals. Over the last decades, work on family and kinship in the early Middle Ages has addressed the basis of this claim through considering two key issues: i) how new types of kinship ties emerged in the early Middle Ages; ii) how far early-medieval kinship was derived from spiritual or blood ties. 

However, kinship can also be used to separate as much as bring together, and kinship ties were not always as permanent as might be inferred. The moments where kinship ties were considered to cease offer us the opportunity to investigate how these conceptual differences might shape or be expressed in social behaviour. By considering the extent to which moments of imposed (or initiated) separation can be considered dissolvement of kinship ties, our workshop addresses two related issues.

First, our workshop seeks to investigate how such separations occurred, and by whom they were acknowledged. Second, it seeks to establish comparable factors that can be extended to kinship ties in early-medieval European and Mediterranean societies that did not necessarily share the same ideological underpinning of family, systems of enforcement, or agreement on which ties were intra- or extra-familial.

Throughout the event and during a final roundtable discussion, we hope to interrogate the extent to which revealing the processes through which kinship may have been dissolved can improve our understanding of how kinship ties were created and sustained in the first place.

Proposals for 30-minute papers are invited from late-stage postgraduates and ECRs. We suggest a few suggested moments to stimulate but not limit the scope of enquiry:

The status of hostages and their familial dependents; their status and reception on return

The treatment of absent or missing relatives and their partners and dependents

The negotiation of familial ties between relatives of differing free/unfree statuses

The treatment of imprisoned, convicted or executed relatives and their dependents

Remarriage, adoption, and other methods to restore familial relationships

Adultery, assault and other (non-legal) modes of instigating separation

Concubinage, fosterage and other modes of quasi-familial status

Familial ties across ethnic, racial or religious divisions

(In)consistent alienation of specific familial rights or duties within separations

Due to the generosity of the Past & Present Society and the Department of History, University of York, accepted speakers who wish to present in person will receive at least a 150-pound bursary towards travel and accommodation. We also welcome applications for virtual presentations.

Please send ca. 300 word abstracts and a brief bio to both organisers, Dr Alex Traves (alex.traves@york.ac.uk) and Dr Becca Grose (becca.grose@york.ac.uk), by 7 April 2023.

 

Call for Papers – CEMS Graduate Conference 2023, 30-31 May (Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Central European University, Vienna)

by Osman Kocabal

 

 

Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Central European University, Vienna

 

Call for Papers – CEMS Graduate Conference 2023, 30-31 May (Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, Central European University, Vienna)

 

Keynote Speaker: Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University, Newark)

 

Humans and Nature in the Mediterranean Landscape 

 

The consequences of global warming, pandemics, and ecological catastrophes serve as painful reminders of the contingency of human history on its natural environment. These issues have provided a forceful impetus to the study of history with environmental considerations in mind, leading to what scholars coined as an ecological turn. Since Fernand Braudel, several conceptualizations of the Mediterranean and its surroundings as a subject of historical research emphasized how common patterns of climate, geography, flora, and fauna give rise to shared models of ecology, agriculture, and social organization. Subsequently, environmental history, as well as various approaches centering on the environment in several other disciplines, inspired scholars working on a broad range of topics related to the history of the Mediterranean and led to the emergence of various perspectives on the problems of nature, landscape, sustainability, environment, and ecology.  

 

We would like to highlight chase the broad variety of approaches to these topics and to show that themes of nature, environment, and ecology are not only a concern of environmental historians, but they could serve as shared spaces of encounter between scholars arriving from an array of backgrounds and disciplines. To this end, we would like to encourage the application of any participants whose interest relates to these fields, even if they don’t consider themselves “environmental historians proper.” Also, we hope to grope toward a conceptualization of the relations between humans and nature, which complements the agricultural and rural focus of the discipline with a thematization of urban landscapes and spaces as parts of ecologies.  

 

We welcome the application of scholars working on but not limited to Anthropology, Archeology, Art History, Classics, Environmental Science and History, Gender Studies, History, Languages and Literatures, Medieval Studies, Early Modern Studies, Philosophy, Religion, and Theology. We hope that this lax interpretation of the boundaries of environmental history will engender new avenues of dialogues on past ecologies that would help participants and audiences think anew and appreciate the diversity of environments and their historical representations in the context of Mediterranean history.  

 

We welcome any topics related but not limited to the following themes and disciplines: 

 

• Climate, climate change and natural catastrophes
• Botanical and meteorological history
• History of ecologies and landscapes 
• Landscapes and ecologies as cultural heritage
• Folklores, religions, belief systems and the natural world
• History of sacred spaces and their heritage
• History of agriculture, resource management and sustainability
• History of public health
• History of pandemics and plagues
• Animal history and human-animal relations
• Representations of ecologies, nature, landscapes, animals and pandemics in art, architecture literature.
• History of cosmologies, natural sciences and natural philosophies
• Everyday lives and nature
• History of urban and rural landscapes
• History of things, material history
• History of commerce, trades and industry
• Geo-politics

 

Submit your proposals at cemsconference@ceu.edu by 10. 04. 2023.

Limited funding is available for travel and accommodation