Call for Papers – Connecting Late Antiquities conference 

(Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, 03-05.02.2025) 

 

On behalf of Professors Julia Hillner (BCDSS) and Richard Flower (University of Exeter), we cordially invite colleagues to submit paper proposals for our conference on Connecting Late Antiquities, to be held at the University of Bonn, 3-5 February 2025. 

 

Connecting Late Antiquities, generously sponsored by Germany’s Deutsche Forschungs-gemeinschaft and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, is a collaborative project to create open, digital prosopographical resources for the Roman and post-Imperial territories between the third and seventh centuries. Its main aim is to digitise, unite, and link existing resources to make them more accessible and enhance their reach and utility. The enterprise will dramatically improve access to information about late-antique people for all scholars of this period and allow the easy integration of prosopographical material with online geographical, textual, epigraphic, and papyrological resources.  

 

Technological developments have provided new opportunities for prosopography, including allowing for both constant updating and an expansion beyond the traditional focus on the higher echelons of society. The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire and Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects provide excellent examples of the greater possibilities allowed by this approach. Connecting Late Antiquities will draw together material from a variety of major printed prosopographies and specialist digital databases, as well as incorporating entries for 'non-elite' individuals who are attested in ancient sources but have not been included in earlier publications. This approach will allow more extensive research into understudied figures and their social connections. 

 

We have a limited number of slots for papers of up to 20 minutes in length and therefore invite colleagues to submit abstracts of max. 300 words (plus a brief bio) on any aspect of Late Antique prosopography.  

 

We particularly welcome submissions suggesting new discoveries and approaches within the following themes: 

·       Prosopography and the rise of literature in Late Antique local languages, both western (e.g. Irish, Pictish, Welsh) and eastern (e.g. Armenian, Coptic, Syriac). 

·       Prosopography and the ‘usual suspects’ (aristocracies, rulers, office-holders, etc.). 

·       Prosopography and the ‘unusual suspects’ (e.g. anonymous individuals, marginalised individuals, religious minorities, non-privileged groups). 

·       Prosopography and gender.  

·       Prosopography and the challenges, limits, and opportunities of digital humanities.   

·       Methodological avenues to overcome traditional prosopographical segregations (e.g. clerical/secular, elite/lower-status, human/non-human). 

 

Confirmed roundtable participants and speakers include Yanne Broux,  Niels Gaul, Rodrigo Laham Cohen, Hartmut Leppin, Ralph Mathisen, Muriel Moser, Silvia Orlandi, Arietta Papaconstantinou, Claire Sotinel, Scott Vanderbilt, and Lieve Van Hoof.  

 

We are hoping to cover three nights of accommodation in Bonn, travel expenses, plus all lunches and one conference dinner.  

 

Please send your abstract plus bio to Jeroen Wijnendaele ( jwijnend@uni-bonn.de ) and Jessica van ’t Westeinde ( jwestend@uni-bonn.de ) no later than the 1st of May 2024.

With very best wishes,

Jeroen Wijnendaele & Jessica van ’t Westeinde

Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies