Daniele Bianconi
Associate professor of Greek Palaeography
He deals with the history of Greek handwriting from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age , by perspective that combines the formal aspects of writing and the history of texts, culture and society. He focuses on manuscripts from the Macedonian and Comnenian periods, on intellectual practices and libraries in the Palaeologan age (the city of Thessalonica and the library of Chora in Constantinople), on the transmission of classical texts and on book restoration in Byzantium. He is currently working on Manuel Chrysoloras and the symbolic value of handwriting in Byzantium. He has published about 100 scientific publications including 2 monographs, 4 (co-)edited books and 25 papers in international journals.
André Binggeli
Béatrice Caseau
teaches at Sorbonne university where she led the research cluster of excellence LABEX RESMED (Religions and society in the Mediterranean world 2015-2021). She is a member of the Institut universitaire de France, where she works on Late antique and Byzantine Christianity, with a focus on canon law and religious anthropology. Her latest single authored book was on Byzantine food culture (2015). She has also published books of collected essays on sacred spaces and pilgrimages (2006), on Eucharistic practices (2009), on family networks (2012) and questions of inheritance (2014). A book on religions and food taboos, and one on religious rituals and the senses in religious cultures of Antiquity and the Middle ages are to appear in 2021.
SORBONNE UNIVERSITÉ, PARIS
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Eva von Conzen
is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture”. Her research focuses on narrative theory and medieval literature as well as on lists and enumerations in literary texts. She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration (2016), and has recently co-edited Narratologie und mittelalterliches Erzählen (2018; with F. Kragl), the Handbuch Historische Narratologie (2019; with S. Tilg), as well as Enacting the Bible in Medieval and Early Modern Drama (2020; with C. Goodblatt). UNIVERSITY OF FREIBURG, GERMANY EMAIL
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Maria Mavroudi
Professor of Byzantine History and Classics
studied Philology at the University of Thessaloniki, before earning a Ph.D. in Byzantine studies at Harvard. Her scholarly work begun by focusing on a tenth-century Byzantine book on dream interpretation that had been widely received in Latin and the European vernaculars and counted as the Christian dreambook of the Middle Ages. She showed that it was a Christian adaptation of Arabic Islamic material and one among a larger group of texts originally written in Arabic or Persian and received into Greek between the ninth and the fifteenth centuries. During the next two decades, she worked on identifying the place of these translations within Byzantine literary culture and its reception in “East” and “West’ during the medieval and early modern period. This begs reconsidering the position of the ancient Greek classics within the Byzantine, Arabic, and Latin intellectual traditions, as well as the supposed marginality of Byzantium within a broader medieval intellectual universe. Her work was recognized with a MacArthur fellowship in 2002. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKLEY EMAIL
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Stephanos Efthymiadis
has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography, and prosopography. Sixteen of his articles were reprinted at the distinguished series of Variorum Reprints. He also worked on the area of South Italy, Phocea in Asia Minor, and Lesbos.
He is the editor of the two-volume Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography (2011–2014). He co‐edited Niketas Choniates: A Historian and a Writer (2009), and a volume of his collected articles on Byzantine hagiography appeared in 2011. His last book is titled: The Byzantine Hagiography of Cyprus (fourth-thirteenth c.): Saints, Authors and Texts. He is currently preparing a monograph on the political and social history of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople. OPEN UNIVERSITY OF CYPRUS EMAIL
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Isabel Toral
studies Arabic cultural history, with a special focus on the pre-Islamic period and the period to the 11th century AD. Her regional priorities include al-Andalus, Syria and Iraq. She is particularly interested in forms of cultural contact, translation and transfer.
Since October 2018, she has led the ERC project AnonymClassic as Deputy PI. Her focus is on aspects of fictional storytelling, history of translation and modes of cultural translation. FFREIEN UNIVERSITÄT, BERLIN EMAIL
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Karin Kukkonen
is a specialist in narratology, poetics and the long history of the novel. She has published on narrative theory from a cognitive perspective (Probability Design: Literature and Predictive Processing. OUP, 2020), eighteenth-century fiction and literary theory (A Prehistory of Cognitve Poetics. OUP, 2017; How the Novel Found its Feet. OUP, 2019), as well as comics and graphic novels (Contemporary Comics Storytelling. Nebraska, 2014).
At the University of Oslo, she leads the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiative “Literature, Cognition and Emotions” (2019-2023) that brings together literary studies, linguistics, psychology and neurosciences in a new conversation about literature.. In 2019, she was awarded the University of Oslo’s Younger Researcher Prize. UNIVERSITY OF OSLO EMAIL
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