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Call for Papers: New Research in the Vesuvian Cities

23. März 2022, Dorothée Grieb - Call for papers

Round-Table-Conference for young researchers, hybrid mode
eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel, 27 - 28 May 2022

New Research in the Vesuvian Cities

Pompeii, Herculaneum and the other cities in the area around Mt. Vesuvius undoubtedly form an important source of evidence for a number of questions in (Pre)Roman archaeology. The cities’ unique status is reaffirmed by the large number of ongoing PhD projects applying the latest research theories and methods, shedding new light on old questions.

Since several of these projects share comparable questions and approaches, a network of young researchers was formed in 2020, resulting in a first Round-Table Conference in August 2021 at the CAU Kiel. As the meeting proved highly beneficial for all participants, a follow-up conference will be held at the University of Basel in May 2022 with the financial support of eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image Basel, Switzerland.
The aim of these meetings is to bring together young researchers in the early stage of their career, offering them the opportunity to present their projects, discuss interdisciplinary approaches and exchange ideas with a special emphasis on methodical innovativeness. The focus of attention of this year’s conference will be to questions on images and their spatial contexts. Differing contributions are welcome as well.

The call for papers is specifically aimed at but not limited to young international researchers. Participants should currently be working on a subject concerning a PhD, Post-Doc or research project (MA thesis at least) on a subject concerning “the Vesuvius region”.

If you are interested in participating, please submit your application (in English or German) containing a short project description (1 page) and your CV to Adrienne Cornut: adrienne.cornut@unibas.ch. The deadline is April 1st 2022.

Contact:  adrienne.cornut@unibas.ch
 


Call for Papers: Exemplary Representation(s) of the Past: New Readings of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia

01. Februar 2022, Dorothée Grieb - Call for papers

Internationale Konferenz
Fribourg (CH), Institut für Antike und Byzanz, 15.-17.12.2022

Exemplary Representation(s) of the Past: New Readings of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia

Die letzten 30 Jahre haben ein verstärktes Interesse an Valerius Maximus und seinen Facta et dicta memorabilia zutage gefördert; die Sammlung historischer exempla wird nun stärker als zuvor als Werk mit einem eigenen literarischen Anspruch gelesen und im Hinblick auf seine ethische, soziale und intellektuelle Bedeutung im frühen Principat und darüber hinaus untersucht.

Diesem Interesse möchten auch die Mitglieder des an der Universität Fribourg angesiedelten und vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds geförderten Projekts „Im Spiegel der Republik. Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia“ (https://valmax.hypotheses.org/) Ausdruck geben und hiermit eine internationale Konferenz ankündigen, die vom 15. bis 17. Dezember 2022 in hybrider Form in Fribourg (Schweiz) stattfinden wird, unter dem Titel: „Exemplary Representation(s) of the Past: New Readings of Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia“.

Die Konferenz hat das Ziel, neue Perspektiven auf Valerius und sein Werk zu eröffnen. Wir freuen uns daher auf Forschungsbeiträge zu unterschiedlichen Aspekten der Facta et dicta memorabilia sowie zu ihrer Rezeption. Dabei könnten sowohl einzelne Passagen (z.B. Kapitel oder Sequenzen von exempla) im Zentrum stehen als auch das Werk insgesamt; mögliche Zugänge könnten etwa Valerius’ literarische Gestaltung, seine Vorstellungen von der Vergangenheit Roms oder auch seine weitere sozio-ethische oder intellektuelle Bedeutung sein.

Ihre Teilnahme bereits zugesagt haben die drei externen Partner des Fribourger Projekts, Prof. Rebecca Langlands (University of Exeter), Prof. Matthew B. Roller (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) und Prof. David Wardle (University of Cape Town).

Die Konferenzsprache wird Englisch sein. Eine Publikation der Beiträge in einem renommierten Fachverlag ist geplant.

Konkrete Themenvorschläge mit einem inhaltlichen Abstract von max. 300 Wörtern sollten bis Montag, 28. Februar 2022 per E-Mail eingereicht werden (tanja.itgenshorst@unifr.ch).
Es wäre sehr nützlich, wenn Sie bereits angeben könnten, ob Sie im Präsenzmodus in Fribourg teilnehmen würden (sofern dies die allgemeine Lage gestattet). Mit einer Rückmeldung von unserer Seite ist Mitte März 2022 zu rechnen.
Reise- und Unterbringungskosten bei der Anreise nach Fribourg werden erstattet.

Université de Fribourg
Institut für Antike und Byzanz
Geschichte der Antike
Rue Pierre-Aeby 16
CH-1700 Fribourg

https://valmax.hypotheses.org/
 


Call for Papers: The End of the Roman Climate Optimum and the Disintegration of the Roman Empire

04. November 2021, Dorothée Grieb - Call for papers

International Conference
Binn, Valais, Switzerland, 29 Aug – 1 Sep 2022

The End of the Roman Climate Optimum and the Disintegration of the Roman Empire

Palaeoclimatologists believe to have identified a period of unusually warm and humid weather in Europe and the Mediterranean that expanded from roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE, which they called the ‘Roman Climate Optimum’ or the ‘Roman warm period’. Some historians have linked this overall perseverance of unusually stable and favorable climatic conditions to the expansion of the Roman Empire to its greatest height, and argue that these predominantly warm and humid conditions in large parts of the Empire enabled the delivery of sufficient supply to the growing urban population around the Mediterranean and to the Roman army. From the middle of the second century CE, climate change occurred at different rates, from apparent near stasis during the early Empire to rapid fluctuations during the late Empire. A general cooling trend coincided and, as some scholars argue, contributed to the crisis of the Empire, the Germanic migration, civil wars, and the subsequent ‘decline’ or ‘transformation’ of the Roman world. Furthermore, differences in climate conditions in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean have been hypothezised to mirror the diverging fates of the Roman West and the Byzantine Empire. More recently, other scholars based on regional datasets of climate proxies have reasoned that establishing such a connection between the climatic conditions and its consequences for the history of the Roman Empire does not do justice to the multitude of microclimates in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa on the one hand and the complexity of the material available on the other one.

This international conference will be the first that is specifically devoted to the notion of a Roman Climate Optimum and its impact on the fate of the Roman Empire. The conference will examine the implications of a Roman Climate Optimum for writing Roman environmental, political, social and economic history, and will bring climate scientists, ancient historians and environmental archaeologists around one table. We aim at papers that focus on regional studies and pursue a synthesis of the evidence from written, archaeological, and natural climate archives. Special emphasis will be placed on the challenges of a collaboration between ancient historians, archaeologists and palaeoclimatologists, the methodological difficulties in distinguishing between correlation and causality, and methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying causal connections.

The event is part of the research project ‘The Roman Egypt Laboratory: Climate Change, Societal Transformations, and the Transition to Late Antiquity’ (PI: Sabine R. Huebner) and is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Swiss Association of Classical Studies (SVAW/ASEA), and the Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (SAGUF). 

Confirmed speakers include:

  • John Haldon (Princeton University)
  • Joseph McConnell (University of Nevada)
  • Annalisa Marzano (University of Reading)
  • Timothy Newfield (Georgetown University)
  • Lee Mordechai (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
  • Kevin Bloomfield (Cornell University)
  • Paolo Maranzana (Boğaziçi University)
  • Petra Vaiglova (Washington University)
  • Christophe Corona (University of Clermont Auvergne)
  • Brandon McDonald (University of Basel)
  • Matthias Stern (LMU Munich)
  • François Blondel (University of Geneva)
  • Charlotte L. Pearson (University of Arizona)
  • Markus Stoffel (University of Geneva)

We welcome abstracts of about 300 words. Papers should be 20 minutes in length, allowing for 10 minutes of discussion time after each paper, and should be in English. We encourage junior researchers and recent PhD holders to apply as well. The results of this conference will be published in form of an open-access peer-reviewed volume in the new series “Studies in Premodern History and Environment”, ed. CCHRI, Oxford University Press.

Please submit your abstract by e-mail to Prof. Dr. Sabine R. Huebner (sabine.huebner@unibas.ch), including the full title of your paper and a short biographical note on your affiliation and previous research.
The deadline for proposals is 30 November 2021.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Sabine Huebner
Petersgraben 51
4051 Basel
Schweiz
e-mail: sabine.huebner@unibas.ch


Call for Papers: The Eastern Roman Empire under the Severans – new beginnings, old connections?

20. Oktober 2021, Dorothée Grieb - Call for papers

International Conference, Online
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, 16.-18. June 2022

The Eastern Roman Empire under the Severans – new beginnings, old connections?

After the murder of the emperor Pertinax, the year AD 193 saw four men being proclaimed as Roman emperors by their respective troops: in Rome, Didius Julianus, an Italian, was made emperor by the Praetorian guard; Septimius Severus, who was from North Africa and had a Syrian wife, was sponsored by the troops in Pannonia; Pescennius Niger, who was from Italy, was supported by the troops in Syria and finally Clodius Albinus, again from North Africa, was proclaimed emperor by the troops in Britain. It was Septimius Severus who finally defeated his rivals and established a new dynasty that ruled till AD 235. The Severan dynasty would go on to instituted profound changes in the Roman Empire that would shape the empire’s responses towards the various challenges of the third century.

Despite the fact that the year of the four emperors in AD 193 clearly shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, scholarship called Septimius Severus the “African emperor”[1] and his wife and her family the “Syrian empresses”[2]. Equally, the two final emperors of the dynasty, Elagabal and Severus Alexander, are also often framed within a narrative of oriental exoticism stressing their Syrian background[3]. Even though there has been considerable scholarly interest in the Severan dynasty in the last 20 years, scholarship has not been able to entirely shake off this ‘narrative of origin’. However, important progress has been made with recent studies on individual emperors and empresses of the dynasty as well as on different aspects of their reign. Thus, aspects of Severan administration – in particular the famous Constitutio Antoniana – and military policy have received scholarly attention and re-evaluation. Equally, important new studies have stressed the innovative framing of imperial propaganda and self-representation under the Severans and the dynasty’s so far underestimated impact on Roman culture as a whole. Rantala even goes so far as to claim in the title of his book on the ludi Saeculares that the Severans instituted “a new Roman Empire”[4].

To date, however, no study has comprehensibly looked at the impact of Severan rule on the Eastern parts of the Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire was, of course, also affected by the Severan refashioning of empire – from administrative changes in Egypt and Syria to building activities across the Eastern provinces, the Severans left their mark on a region they should in the logic of the ‘narrative of origin’ have been particularly partial to. But were they? Do administrative measures of the Severan emperors show a particular insight into matters of the Eastern part of the Empire? Could the new dynasty draw on local connections to develop and institute these? Did the communities of the Eastern Empire in their turn profit from the fact that the emperors and empresses hailed from their part of the world? Did they built more or honor the emperors of the Severan dynasty more because they felt a special connection to them? And what kind of a Roman Empire do we have to imagine in the East in Severan times? Did the peoples of the Eastern parts of the Empire refashion their identities because of the ‘Syrian empresses’? In short – what happened in the Eastern Roman Empire under Severan rule – do we see new beginnings, old connections?

“The Eastern Roman Empire under the Severans – new beginnings, old connections?” will bring together scholars from a wide variety of fields taking a new look at the impact of Severan rule on the Eastern half of the Roman empire in a three-day digital conference at the FU Berlin in 2022. The conference will aim to provide a forum for scholars working on the Severan age in the Eastern Roman Empire to showcase their work as well as offering a comprehensive insight into the state of the art of our current knowledge on this issue.

Speakers will be given 30 minutes for a presentation, followed by 15 minutes for discussion. Papers can be given in German, English and French, though the main language of communication will be English. Short abstracts for the papers will be shared in advance of the conference with the participants. Papers will be given by invited speakers, but this call for papers is also open for applications for further papers.
Please contact us till November, 19th, 2021, with a short proposal (400 words), if you wish to present a paper at the conference:  julia.hoffmann-salz@fu-berlin.de

Organizers:
Matthäus Heil, Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften:  heil@bbaw.de
Julia Hoffmann-Salz, Free University Berlin:  julia.hoffmann-salz@fu-berlin.de
Holger Wienholz, German Archaeological Institute:  holger.wienholz@dainst.org


Notes:
[1] A. Birley, Septimius Severus: The African emperor, London 1999.
[2] J. Babelon, Impératrices syriennes, Paris 1957.
[3] E.g. R. Turcan, Héliogabale et le sacre du soleil, Paris 1985.
[4] J. Rantala, The Ludi Saeculares of Septimius Severus: the ideologies of a new Roman Empire, London 2017.

 


Call for Papers: Ästhetisches Aushandeln. Normen und Praktiken in der Vormoderne

13. Oktober 2021, Katrin Bemmann - Call for papers

Internationale Tagung: Materialität und Medialität: Aspekte einer anderen Ästhetik

Vom 02. bis 04. März 2022 findet die Tagung des Querschnittsbereichs "Materialität und Medialität" an der Universität Tübingen statt.


Der Tübinger Sonderforschungsbereich 1391 „Andere Ästhetik“ untersucht ästhetische Phänomene der Vormoderne und verortet diese in einem dynamischen Spannungsfeld von Autologie und Heterologie. Die autologische Dimension meint die technisch-artistischen Eigenlogiken der Artefakte, ihr oft implizites Formwissen oder ihre gestalterischen Traditionen, während in heterologischer Dimension die funktionale Einbindung von Artefakten in pragmatisch-historische Alltags- oder Diskurslogiken oder in soziale Praktiken in den Blick tritt. In den Aushandlungsprozessen zwischen beiden Dimensionen wird nach Koordinaten eines vormodernen ästhetischen Selbstverständnisses gesucht. Als solche Koordinaten, denen über einen längeren Zeitraum hinweg maßgebliche Ausstrahlungskraft zukam, haben die Querschnittsbereiche des Sonderforschungsbereichs verschiedene Leitaspekte – meist in Begriffspaaren angeordnet – identifiziert, von denen sie sich besondere Aufschlusskraft erhoffen. Die Tagung soll den interdisziplinären Dialog des Querschnittsbereichs „Norm und Diversität“ fortführen und ihn in einem bewusst breiten Fächerspektrum vertiefen.

Vorschläge für Vorträge oder alternative Präsentationsformen werden mit aussagekräftigem Exposé (insgesamt max. 300 Wörter, auf Deutsch oder Englisch) und einem Kurz-CV in einer PDF-Datei bis zum 31.3.2021 erbeten an: sarah.dessi@uni-tuebingen.de und sandra.linden@uni-tuebingen.de (bitte immer an beide Adressen).

Weiteres: Den vollständigen CfP finden Sie hier
Wann: 11. November 2021 - 13. November 2021
Ort: 72070 Tübingen, Alte Aula; online

 


Call for Papers: Lector, quas patieris hic salebras! The Stumbling Texts (and Stumbling Readers) of Late Latin Poetry

29. Juni 2021, Philipp Weiss - Call for papers

International Conference and Workshop
Basel, 30th Sept. – 2nd Oct. 2021

Deadline for 300-word abstract submissions: 15th July 2021

Lector, quas patieris hic salebras! The Stumbling Texts (and Stumbling Readers) of Late Latin Poetry

Many ‘late’ Latin poets like Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris are considered second-class. While in recent years much attention has been paid to the theoretical and methodical presuppositions of this and other comparable judgements, hardly a word has emerged from the so judged themselves. This is all the more noteworthy because an author judging his own text was a meaningful and formally varied phenomenon in late antiquity. The two aforementioned poets know, at least according to their paratexts, that they are second-class: our title, for example, we’ve taken from Sidonius’ ninth poem.

As paratextuality further establishes itself as a point of interest in Latin research, it becomes easier to pursue systematically how, by whom and under what conditions the configurations of a work came together and how it is contextualized in something like literary history. A somewhat different focus is the question of parergonality: how and when does a work become a literary oeuvre and what relationship do the different parts have to each other? In as far as such questions circle around reception theory, reading itself and the dynamic of individual interpretations become particularly meaningful. Here it is necessary to consider where and when the reader constitutes a historical, abstract or otherwise describable entity.

(Post-)Structural perspectives afford a specific access to such varied and small-scale works like those of Ausonius and Sidonius—an approach independent of preconceived literary epochs: instead of considering the often unavoidable ‘late antiquity’ of our authors which imbues their biographies and cultural history, we want to turn our gaze to their poetics and to the dimension of literary interpretation. With all this in mind, we send out this call for papers, addressing it especially to doctoral students and early career researchers.

We welcome papers on late antique prose or poetry. Questions to be dealt with may include the following ones:

  • What form, and by extension what terminology, comprises (late) classical paratextuality?
  • What makes a work a parergon or an opus or an opusculum? What are the interpretative consequences of such categorizations?
  • When do collected works become an oeuvre? How do we hermeneutically deal with breaks, inconsistencies, repetitions, etc.?
  • How far does a biographical approach to paratextual poetry bring us—and how disposable is it?
  • What do intertextuality and referentiality mean for later works? Is an absolute reading (that is, without Virgil and Horace readily at hand) not only possible but even practical?
  • How are we to understand the literarily critical content of the paratexts, for instance the topic of modesty? What is the relationship between authorial self-assessment and later literary historiography? Which arguments are used (and by whom) to justify whether or not a work should—and can—be read?

During the conference, we aim for a joint reading and discussion. To this end, every speaker should make a detailed abstract or even the paper itself, along with the relevant original texts, available at least two weeks before the conference so that all attendants have the possibility to prepare. Each program item will be allotted forty-five minutes, with the presentation itself limited to a maximum of twenty of this forty-five minutes.

The language for discussions and presentations will be English. However, precirculated papers may be written also in French, Italian, or German.

Subsidies for travel and accommodation can be granted for people without institutional funding.

Abstracts of ca. 300 words should be sent by July 15th 2021 to a.staehle@unibas.ch and markus.kersten@unibas.ch.

Contact:
Dr. phil. Markus Kersten
Universität Basel, Departement Altertumswissenschaften
Petersgraben 51
4051 Basel (Schweiz)


Call for Papers: Theoretical Approaches to Computational Archaeology

25. Juni 2021, Katrin Bemmann - Call for papers

19 & 20 octobre 2021

 

Brno - Masaryk University - Department of Archaeology and Museology

7th annual meeting of the CE-TAG Central European Theoretical Archaeology Group

 

Past two decades brought us a growth in use of computational methods and big data in archaeological research. This resulted in a significant shift in the research of human past and an increasing number of publications covering a broad spectrum of topics from remote sensing applications to site distribution or network analyses. Simultaneously, a strong countermovement from the humanities part of archaeology appeared and criticized these research approaches for lacking theory or even ‘dehumanization’ of the discipline. This gives an impression of two camps in conflict with each other – mostly based on the prejudices of ‘cultural emphases’ by one group and the ‘gloss-over-culture attitude’ by the other. However, both research approaches are much needed to be used together. After all, the ‘third science revolution’ in archaeology is defined by such collaboration. How effectively do we combine the archaeological theory with computational techniques? Are there any pitfalls? Which practices should we avoid? Is computational archaeology really without theory?

 

Organizing committee:
- Michael Kempf
- Jan Kolář
- Petr Pajdla
- Jiří Macháček

Institute of Archaeology and Museology - Faculty of Arts - Masaryk University - Brno

 

The official language of the conference is English

 

Please send abstracts (up to 250 words ) of your paper proposals including your contact information and affiliation details by the 15th of July 2021 to kempf@phil.muni.cz


Call for Papers: Those. Othering, Alterity, Appropriation in Ancient Art

09. Februar 2021, Philipp Weiss - Call for papers

Digital conference
Institute of Classical Archaeology, Hamburg University, 20 - 21 May 2021

Those. Othering, Alterity, Appropriation in Ancient Art

Concepts of others, othering, self-representation or opposing worlds are topics of well-known conferences and publications over the last decades. Due to the relevance and width of the topic, the announced event would like to continue the investigations and furthermore consider the Greeks and Romans as strangers in other cultures and the location of the ancient world in global history.

Dealing with others and the demarcation of the self is a determining phenomenon of human activity. Contact with others is an integral part of societies and allows each society to locate in a wider context. The disparaging characterization of others has always served to stabilize a group's identity but not only concepts of enemies, also excessive idealizations of those others.

Antiquity is no exception. The confrontation with a close or distant counterpart serves the construction of social identities and usually exposes more about the ascribing group than about the portrayed. At the same time, the frequent presence of the stereotyped image of the foreign reciprocally constructs further conceptions. Consequently, the impact of depictions on further prejudices is worthy to be studied too.

For this conference, the term others (“those”) is broadly defined; including neighboring and distant, real and mythical foreign peoples, individual populations whose demarcation serves to identify other groups: poor, sick, women, men, religious adherents. This also includes the Greeks and Romans themselves, who found their way into depictions and descriptions as others by their contemporaneous counterparts and later epochs.

The aim of the conference is to consider dealing with others, contexts of othering and alterity, to question about center and periphery and the reversal of this view, while investigating the self-positioning of those presenting others, likewise the positioning of today's scientific perspectives.

Theoretical approaches to the semiotic aspect of signs for others and others as signs are just as welcome as contributions aiming at cultural theoretical approaches to objectify and defocus ancient studies.

Contributions of no longer than 30 minutes might regard the following themes and related aspects:

  • Mythologized foreign
  • Greco-Roman representations of others
  • Representations of minorities and subalterns in ancient societies
  • Representations of Greeks and Romans as others
  • Hybridities in border areas

The aim of the open call is to achieve a variety of theoretical, material-based and both combining contributions. Please submit paper proposals (300 – 500 words) until 15 March 2021 to Dr. Lilian Adlung-Schönheit (lilian.schoenheit@uni-hamburg.de).

Host of this conference is the Institute of Classical Archeology at the University of Hamburg. Due to the current pandemic situation, the conference will take place via Zoom. Therefore, we would like to look forward to bringing together colleagues from different countries and interests.

Contact: lilian.schoenheit@uni-hamburg.de


Call for Papers: Jüdische Autoren und Macht in griechisch-römischer Zeit

26. Januar 2021, Philipp Weiss - Call for papers

Online-Workshop
Universität Bern, Institut für Judaistik, 03.-04.06.2021

Jüdische Autoren und Macht in griechisch-römischer Zeit

Die Frage nach Macht und Machtstrukturen erfuhr und erfährt noch immer grosse Beachtung in wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen der griechisch-römischen Zeit und sie ist ganz besonders prominent in Analysen der komplexen und ereignisreichen Geschichte des Judentums in dieser Zeitspanne. Die Auseinandersetzung mit dieser Thematik betrifft ein weites Feld, von Machtausübung seitens der herrschenden Imperien oder Widerstand gegen (als ungerecht und tyrannisch empfundene) Herrschaft seitens der lokalen Bevölkerungen. Dennoch sehen diese Auseinandersetzungen Macht als zumeist physische Entität, wie Ausübung von Macht als Gewalt seitens eines Staatsgefüges oder als Ausbeutung unterworfener Völker. Die fruchtbare Anwendung postkolonialer Theorien und Perspektiven auf die Antike und auf die Jewish Studies hat diesen Trend zwar gebrochen und den Fokus auf Formen ‘weicher’ Machtausübung gerichtet, aber nicht immer ist die Übertragung und Anwendung moderner Theorien auf antike Verhältnisse problemlos möglich.

Der geplante Workshop soll als Ausgangspunkt dienen für eine Diskussion, wie jüdische Autoren Macht und Machtverhältnisse in ihren Texten darstellen, be- und ergründen. Der Mittelmeerraum sowie beträchtliche Teile des Mittleren und Nahen Ostens standen in griechisch-römischer Zeit unter wechselnder, indirekter und direkter Fremdherrschaft und alle dortigen Völker mussten sich mit den daraus folgenden, sich stetig ändernden Machtstrukturen und Machtverhältnissen auseinandersetzen – wie auch mit dem Verlust der eigenen Macht und politischen Autonomie. Es wäre beispielsweise zu fragen: Definieren jüdisch-hellenistische und jüdisch-römische Autoren Macht und falls ja, wie definieren sie Macht? Wie wird Macht in ihren Texten begründet, beschrieben und verhandelt? Gibt es Texte, die sich im- oder explizit aufeinander beziehen, finden sich Querverweise? Wie nehmen die Autoren Macht wahr und wie kann sich diese Wahrnehmung auf ihre Texte auswirken – inhaltlich wie formal? Lässt sich Macht nachvollziehen in Charakterbeschreibungen, konstatierten sozialen Normen und Tugenden? Zeichnen sich die Texte durch einen Blick von innen, vom Machtzentrum ausgehend, oder durch einen Blick von aussen, von der Peripherie aus? Gibt es Beschränkungen von Macht oder werden alternative Herrschaftsstrukturen diskutiert? Finden sich in den Texten Hinweise auf einen (angestrebten) Ausgleich der Machtverhältnisse?

Ziel des Workshops ist es, Wissenschaftler/innen aus allen Bereichen der Altertumswissenschaft zu gewinnen für eine Diskussion und Untersuchung des Einflusses der hellenistischen und römischen Machtstrukturen auf Autoren aus dem Mittelmeerraum und dem Nahen Osten. Beiträge aus allen Disziplinen sind willkommen und dieser Workshop richtet sich explizit an Nachwuchswissenschaftler/innen und Post-Docs. Interessenten werden gebeten, einen Abstract von maximal 300 Wörtern bis zum 1. Februar an rotem.avnerimeir@helsinki.fi oder judith.goeppinger@theol.unibe.ch zu schicken.

Der Workshop wird online via Zoom stattfinden.

Kontakt:
judith.goeppinger@theol.unibe.ch
rotem.avnerimeir@helsinki.fi


Call for Papers: Beyond Mysteries. The Hybrid History of Ancient Eleusis

18. November 2020, Philipp Weiss - Call for papers

International Conference
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, September 30 - October 2, 2021

Beyond Mysteries. The Hybrid History of Ancient Eleusis

Renowned for its Mysteries cult, Eleusis has been equated already in antiquity with its initiations for the worship of Demeter and Persephone. Life in the renowned sanctuary was, however, richer than the religious lens suggests, including political, military, athletic, and euergetic activities. And the importance of the city was clearly not confined to the Mysteries.

Situated at the crossroads between Athens, Boiotia, Megara, and Salamis, Eleusis was subject to the changing fortunes in the world around. This is reflected also in various alterations to the basic political outlook of the city, from polis to deme to Sonderstaat (in 404 BCE) and back to deme. From the Athenian perspective, Eleusis marked the fringes of their territory. From everybody else’s point of view, it was either a destination or a gateway: to Athens, the Saronic region and Aegean, Central Greece, or the Peloponnese. In the midst of these itineraries, the Eleusinians fostered the belief that they were located at the navel of a widely connected world.

The conference explores Eleusis’s inherent in-betweenness. It invites approaches that appreciate and are alert to the local horizon as a sphere where different vectors of Greek culture touch, both complementarily and conflictually, to shape a hybrid history of place: for instance, an amalgamation of diverse natural environments and different political entities; of boundedness and entanglement; imaginaries of isolation and belonging; material and immaterial expressions in culture that were in themselves fused by local, regional, and universal practices. In this vein of inquiry, the conference will also return to the Mysteries and place them in the context of religious communications in the Saronic region and beyond, on land and at sea, across time.

Paper proposals, no longer than 400 words in length for a paper between 25 to 30 minutes, should be sent to the organizers no later than January 31, 2021. The full slate of selected papers will be announced within four weeks after the submission deadline. Conference participants will be reimbursed all costs for air travel, ground transportation, and accommodation.

Organizers:
Hans Beck (hans.beck@uni-muenster.de)
Sebastian Scharff (scharffs@uni-muenster.de)

The event is sponsored by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ and the Chair of Greek History at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster.