Série de séminaires – Four Season Byzantine seminar - Becoming and Un-becoming Roman

Interventions en anglais

en ligne

7.00 pm (Istanbul), 8.00 am (Vancouver).

Table ronde: In-Between

Organised in partnership with Koç University, Bilkent University and Hacettepe University

Scott Kennedy (Bilkent University): Deromanizing and Reromanizing the Periphery: the empire of Trebizond and Constantinople

Ian Randall (University of British Columbia): Romanitas and Ceramic Communities of Practice in Early Medieval Cyprus

For well over a decade now, Byzantine scholars have sought to answer thorny questions of the Byzantines’ identity, discussing how their art, literature, and material culture reflected it or how that identity permeated after Byzantium. They debated whether Byzantines were Greeks, Romans, or something else. Central to these discussions is the nature of the Byzantine Empire: was it a proto-nation state bound by Romanness or an empire held together by elite images of identity projected on heterogeneous ethnicities? Were Byzantines part of a larger Christian commonwealth? As we come to accept that Byzantines are generally identified as Romans, new questions continue to emerge. Should we replace artificial terms such as Byzantium and Byzantine with Rome and Roman? When and how does that Romanity stop? What social factors lead Romans to deny Romanness to others? What does the process of de-Romanization look like in the literary and material domains (sharp breaks or continuity and transformation)?

The seminar series “Becoming and un-becoming Roman” (organized by Bilkent University, Hacettepe University, the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes, and Koç University) aims to address these questions focusing on how one unbecome a Roman. When did people finally answer the question “to be a Roman or not to be a Roman '' with a negative answer? We will gather a wide range of contributions from literary, historical, artistic, and material angles from across Roman and former Roman territories after Constantine the Great.