Human/Animal Studies in Classics. Aisthesis/Aesthetics
Kiel, 2–3 October 2026

Deadline for submission: 12 December 2025

The perception and assessment of beauty is a defining characteristic of the human species. Whether we like a person or an object significantly affects our reaction: we are either attracted or repelled; we either want to possess the object or despise it; we either feel proud or ashamed of our connection to the person. Our conference explores the role that perceptions of beauty (or the lack of it) played in human-animal-relations in antiquity.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we welcome contributions from various fields such as ancient history, classical philology, philosophy, religious studies, and archaeology which focus on the visual or literary representation of aesthetic aspects of human-animal relationships in antiquity. The conference languages are German, English, French and Italian. The publication of the contributions is planned. Researchers at all qualification levels are invited to submit an abstract.

Please send your proposal (max. 1 A4 page) by 12 December 2025 to isleme.sassi@email.uni-kiel.de and bettina.reese@uni-potsdam.de. We are seeking funds to contribute towards the speakers' (train) travel expenses.

Organisation
Prof. Dr. Islème Sassi
Fachdidaktik der Alten Sprachen
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Leibnizstrasse 8; Büro 415
24118 Kiel

Dr. Bettina Reese
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin
Professur Geschichte des Altertums
Historisches Institut | Universität Potsdam

The complete Call for Papers in German and English can be found here as PDF.

Fluid Spaces – Mobility, Networks, and Encounters in Pre-Roman Italy
24th Meeting of the dArV Network ‘Etruscan and Italic Communities’
Vienna, 13 to 15 February 2026

Deadline for submission: 15 November 2025

We invite submissions discussing all aspects of mobility, networks, and encounters in pre-Roman Italy. The conference will cover the entire Italian peninsula, including Sardinia and Sicily, as well as the Greek coastal cities, from the early Iron Age throughout the entire first millennium BCE, up to the Roman expansion.

This Call is open to early-career researchers, including advanced graduate students, as well as senior colleagues. Contributions can be delivered in German, English, or Italian and should last approximately 20 minutes, allowing for 15 minutes of discussion. Interested colleagues are warmly invited to submit the title and brief abstract (100–200 words) of a potential conference paper to the following email addresses by 15 November 2025:
raffaella.da.vela@univie.ac.at; matthias.hoernes@univie.ac.at; robinson.peter.kraemer@univie.ac.at.

Organisation
Petra Amann – Raffaella Da Vela – Matthias Hoernes – Robinson Krämer
University of Vienna, Department of Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy – Institute of Classical Archaeology
dArV Network ‘Etruscan and Italic Communities’

The complete Call for Papers in German, English and Italian can be found here as PDF.

Language in Crisis, Crisis in Language, Language on Crisis: Interdisciplinary Perspectives From Antiquity to Modern Times
November 20th-21st, 2025
online (University of Cologne)

Deadline: October 13th, 2025

The online conference “Language in Crisis, Crisis in Language, Language on Crisis. Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Ancient to Modern Times” explores this mutual influence between historical moments of crisis and the usage of language across different ancient cultures and is particularly interested in how insights in the ancient thoughts about the intersection of crisis and language can help us to better understand the role of language in our own societies. Besides, we would like to inspire a discussion upon potential common traits across cultures in their reactions to internal strife by and through language that might reflect universal human experiences.

Outline of the Program
The conference will be held online on November 20th/21st, 2025. On the first evening, a keynote lecture given by a guest speaker will introduce the conference. On the second day, six contributions of 30 minutes each (25 minutes for the presentation and 5 minutes for discussion) will take place from 11 A.M. to 3 P.M. CET (including an hour-long lunch break), concluding in a panel discussion led by the organisers from 4 P.M. to 5 P.M. CET. The language of the conference will be English.

Abstracts
Proposals for contributions are welcomed from every scholarly level: submissions by early career scholars are particularly encouraged. A distinctive character of this conference is its comparative and intercultural approach. We are therefore looking for contributions covering a wide range of ancient cultures, among others, Egyptology, Ancient Near Eastern Studies, Classics, Mesoamerican Studies, Indoeuropean Linguistics and others. 

Proposals for contributions should not exceed 500 words (excluding bibliography) and should be emailed as anonymized PDF to Isabel Caspar (icaspar1@uni-koeln.de) and Margherita Coughlan (margheritacoughlan@gmail.com) no later than October 13th, 2025. Applicants will be informed about the outcome of their submission ca. 15 days after the deadline.

Contact
For further inquiries, please contact Isabel Caspar (icaspar1@uni-koeln.de) or Margherita Coughlan (margheritacoughlan@gmail.com). We look forward to your submissions and to an engaging conference!

The complete Call for Papers can be downloaded as PDF.

53nd International Conference on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA)
Vienna, 31 March - 4 April 2026

Deadline for submission: 26 October 2025

You are invited to submit an abstract for a paper or poster on any aspect of computer applications or quantitative methods in archaeology for presentation at CAA’s 53rd conference to be held in Vienna, Austria.

Papers and posters from Students and Early Career Researchers are actively encouraged. The Nick Ryan Bursary will be awarded to the best student paper at CAA2026 and the recipient will receive a bursary of up to € 1,000 to travel to the CAA2027 conference.

The CAA2026 call for papers will stay open until 26 October 2025. Any technical queries related to the CAA2026 submission system, questions about conference organisation or other logistical queries should be directed to caa2026@caaconference.org. Any queries related to the scientific or review process should be sent to the scientific committee at: scientificcommittee@caa-international.org.

The complete Call for Papers and Posters with further information can be found at the conference website.

1. Interdisciplinary BAJA Workshop:
"Who was who? Persons in Antiquity"
7.-8.11.2025, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Deadline for submission: October 1, 2025

Who was actually who and who was someone?
We encounter people in ancient cultures in portraits, texts, archaeological contexts – as individuals, as functionaries, as symbols. But what do we really know about them? And what does it mean to reconstruct "persons of antiquity"?

The workshop "Who was who? People in Antiquity" invites doctoral candidates and early career postdocs to approach this topic together across disciplinary boundaries through methodological exchange and new perspectives.

The workshop is part of the BAJA workshop series and funded by the KSBF Doctoral Promotion Office. This year, it is aimed in particular at researchers who move between disciplinary boundaries and want to develop new questions together. The plan is to publish the contributions and a joint thesis paper. We combine Lightning Talks (5-7 minutes) – as an impulse on your topics, ideas, or case studies – with an open fishbowl discussion: a dynamic format where listeners can join the conversation at any time. The aim is not a classic lecture audience, but a productive exchange at eye level.

Contributions from all areas of classical studies with a wide variety of focuses, such as prosopography, iconography, cultural theory, and methodological approaches from sociology, psychology, computer science or related fields are welcome!

If you would like to participate, send us a short abstract (max. 250 words) with title, a summary of your contribution and a short biographical information by October 1, 2025, to: eva.maria.hemauer@hu-berlin.de 

Organisation
Alexandra Verbovsek, Eva Maria Hemauer, Anne Herzberg-Beiersdorf, Christian di Capua

Contact
eva.maria.hemauer@hu-berlin.de 

The complete Call for Papers can be found as PDF on the conference website.

17th Freiburg (Groningen) Workshop on Hellenistic Poetry
Inscriptional Poetry of the Hellenistic age
Freiburg im Breisgau, 23-25 September 2026

Deadline for submission: 31 October 2025

The Seminar für klassische Philologie at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg announces the seventeenth workshop in the series formerly known as the “Groningen Workshops on Hellenistic Poetry”, now for the first time to be organised in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany on 23-25 September 2026. The theme of this workshop will be Inscriptional Poetry of the Hellenistic age.

Inscriptional poetry of the Hellenistic era is an under-exploited resource for expanding our understanding of Hellenistic literature, society and culture. With its direct connection to specific material contexts, its embeddedness within local history, religion and culture, and its direct link to the lives of individuals otherwise unknown, inscribed poetry offers a precious window onto the Hellenistic world. Moreover, studying inscribed texts allows us to move beyond core centers of poetic patronage and learning (including Alexandria) to gain insight into the whole range of literary experience and experimentation across the Hellenistic world. This corpus, in short, can both challenge and enrich our understanding of the literature of this era.

Scholars wishing to contribute a paper to the workshop are requested to send an e-mail to jacqueline.klooster@altphil.uni-freiburg.de with the title of their paper and a brief abstract (1 page) by 31 October 2025. On acceptance, you will be asked to send a PDF of the complete text of the paper by 1 May 2026, so that it can be distributed among the participants well in advance of the workshop. During the workshop itself there will be time for a short introduction (ca. 10 minutes) followed by extensive discussion of the paper (ca. 35 minutes). If necessary, the workshop will also have an online component.
We are confident we will be able to (partly) fund travel and accommodation costs.

Organisation
Jacqueline Klooster (Freiburg): jacqueline.klooster@altphil.uni-freiburg.de
Annette Harder (Groningen)

The complete Call for Papers is available for download as a PDF file.