New Journal!

Interface. A Journal of Medieval European Literatures    

Promotes connective and interdisciplinary views of the literatures of medieval Europe and explores their place and significance in a world of global literature.
An open-access peer-reviewed journal that invites scholarly papers in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.

No 1 (2015): Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation

Scope

The Journal Interfaces opens an interdisciplinary and multilingual forum for the study of medieval European literatures. These literatures are broadly conceived as the products of the interconnected textual cultures which flourished between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance in a region extending from the North Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean. Interfaces envisages the study of the textual culture of medieval Europe as situated at the intersection of a number of modern disciplines, including history, literature, philology, codicology, philosophy, sociolinguistics, and theology.

Contributions are invited which cross linguistic or disciplinary boundaries in the recognition that the vitality of medieval texts in present-day scholarship and culture demands a space not confined by single philologies, national research traditions, confessions, or disciplinary canons. Interfaces strives to combine methodological questioning of hermeneutic and didactic practices with the opening up of new common themes, new connections between literatures, and new transdisciplinary conceptualisations of the modern understanding of medieval literatures, including regional and global challenges to claims of European unity.

It is the ambition of Interfaces to publish the best new scholarship which will contribute to a redefining of how the medieval textual heritage Europe is read, researched, taught and disseminated in the 21st century. European medieval civilization – of which Greek, Hebrew, Slavonic, and Arabic textual cultures form an integral but often neglected part – will continue to be an important source of cultural identity in a globalised world and the global perspectives of the 21st century impel us to ask new questions of the medieval past. The changing forms and technologies of literature and historical writing in the present also urges us to engage with pre-modern writing in new ways. The texts transmitted to us from the Middle Ages and how we read them are a crucial site for negotiating the relationship between modernity and the past.

Interfaces will promote new types of high quality scholarship as well as make the case for the historical, intellectual, and aesthetic value of the literatures of a broadly conceived medieval Europe.

As a peer-reviewed, non-profit, multilingual, open access journal, Interfaces will also form part of a new democratic and efficient research culture within the Humanities. The journal will regularly feature thematic issues but usually with space for other articles as well. In order to promote multilingualism in the choice of topics as well as in the interaction between scholars, Interfaces invites papers and debate comments in the five main scholarly languages of the field (English, German, Spanish, Italian, French), all with abstracts in English.

Book Tip!

Sakel Dean (ed,), Byzantine Culture. Papers from the Conference ‘Byzantine Days of Istanbul’ held on the occasion of Istanbul being European Cultural Capital 2010, Istanbul, May 21–23 2010, Ankara 2014

International Conference!

IDENTITY, ETHNICITY AND NATIONHOOD BEFORE MODERNITY    

Old Debates and New Perspectives

A conference aimed at encouraging systemic conceptual thinking about pre-modern identity and nationhood, and considering the similarities and differences between the construction and use of ethnic and national categories both within those periods, and in comparison with modernity.

Ertegun House & The Ioannou Centre, University of Oxford 

Friday, April 24, 2015 to Sunday, April 26, 2015 

PROGRAM

The conference is supported by The Oxford Research Centre in Humanities (TORCH), Oxford’s Faculty of History, and the John Fell Fund.

Organising Committee: Ilya Afanasyev, Nicholas Matheou, and Seth Hindin.

International Workshop!

When empires lost their grip on peripheral areas, new political communities could emerge. Often, they were ruled by military elites from outside the empire, who had been more or less involved with its defence system. Frequently, a political landscape of the ‘middle ground’ evolved, with several competing political centres and considerable extension into the barbarian fringes of the imperial system. These ‘sub-imperial’ powers could remain in an unstable balance with the empire, they could eventually replace it, or be drawn into the imperial sphere again. Comparing a number of late antique and medieval Eurasian test cases may offer insights into the dynamics of such constellations. Such new political powers usually faced similar challenges, but relied on rather different structures, with widely different outcomes. The most obvious differences lay in their self-representation and outside perception. Many relied on dynastic legitimacy, many on ethnic identification, often also in combination. All of them sought imperial legitimation, though to very different degrees; a few also claimed imperial status themselves. Most of these polities where rather short-lived, either because the central imperial power recovered or because new ‘barbarian’ groups replaced them. But even if the centrifugal forces disappeared, they might have an effect on the new configuration of the empire. Some of the peripheral polities turned into rather stable entities, and new centres of gravitation evolved. In Europe, a rather persistent landscape of ethnic polities emerged, first in the West, then also in parts of the orthodox world and in Northern and Eastern Central Europe. In Asia, on the other hand, dynastic polities kept succeeding each other, whether in imperial guise or not. This is an obvious difference in long-term development that may serve as a point of departure for the analysis of other variables.

ByzIDeo Workshop: Poster - Program & Abstracts!

The poster of our workshop and the final version of Program & Abstracts are now online!

Interview of Medievalist Walter Pohl!

Walter Pohl's interview by  

Werden wir aus der Geschichte klug?

Warum zerfallen Imperien, wie entstehen neue Völker und Staaten? Wie bilden sich Identitäten heraus und welche Auswirkungen haben Phänomene wie Migration auf die Gesellschaft? Historische Beispiele können uns helfen, diese Prozesse zu verstehen, so der Historiker Walter Pohl im uni:view-Interview.

Here to the text