Bourses — Danemark Aarhus Institute

At the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS, 25 AIAS-COFUND Marie Curie fellowships are available for talented researchers from all academic disciplines over the next year within the first Call for Applications.

Application deadline is 21 March 2014.

 www.aias.au.dk

We hope that you will find the call of interest, and you are welcome to forward the call to other high-level researchers.

Post-doctorat — Chancellor’s Fellows at the University of Edinburgh

2014 Call for Chancellor’s Fellows at the University of Edinburgh

Building on the success of the 2012 and 2013 Chancellor’s Fellowship schemes, the University of Edinburgh has launched a new call for Chancellor’s Fellows. The University intends to appoint to up to 50 tenure-track Chancellor’s Fellowships across the University’s three Colleges as a further major investment in the future of our teaching and research.

These prestigious awards are aimed at early independent research career individuals of the highest potential who have begun to establish a reputation for high quality research at the forefront of their discipline and who have a commitment to learning and teaching at university level. Successful applicants in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences will be appointed at Grade 8 having completed their PhD and acquired equivalent relevant postdoctoral experience which meets the University Grade 8 Academic Job Profile.

Applications in Classics are invited in any of the disciplines of Classics (the classical languages and literatures, ancient philosophy, classical archaeology, and ancient history). The Fellowships are tenable from 1 September 2014. The deadline for applications is 7 February 2014.

Full information on how to apply can be obtained from the University’s Chancellor’s Fellows website:

http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/human-resources/jobs/chancellors-fellowships

Exposition — Dumbarton Oaks online exhibition

The Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives (ICFA) at Dumbarton Oaks presents a new online exhibit entitled A Truthful Record: The Byzantine Institute Filmshttp://www.doaks.org/icfa/truthful-record. This exhibit aims to reveal the context of the films created by the Byzantine Institute between the 1930s and 1940s by combining them with archival records from the collection The Byzantine Institute and Dumbarton Oaks Fieldwork Records and Papers.

A Truthful Record features thirteen motion picture films from the Byzantine Institute, which are stored and preserved at ICFA: one of the Red Sea Monasteries in Egypt, eleven of the Hagia Sophia, and one of the Kariye Camii, both in Istanbul, Turkey. The color films created by the Byzantine Institute’s photographer Pierre Iskender provide significant testimony of the mosaics at Hagia Sophia and Kariye Camii and the techniques employed to uncover and conserve them. When combined with notebook entries written by Byzantine Institute fieldworkers such as Ernest Hawkins and the brothers Richard and William Gregory, the history of the films’ creation truly comes alive. Thomas Whittemore, who founded the Byzantine Institute in 1930, made wide use of the moving images, screening them for donors and patrons (such as Robert Woods and Mildred Bliss), the Byzantine scholarly community, and an interested general audience in the United States and Europe. The exhibit is divided into three sections that investigate how the films were made and how they were received by contemporary audiences: Style and ContentTechnique, and Purpose and Reception. You can also explore the archival materials chronologically using a detailed Timeline.

This online exhibit was created by Fani Gargova, ICFA Byzantine Research Associate. The ICFA team would like to give special thanks to the Dumbarton Oaks Publications Department for their generous assistance and support throughout this project. For more information about ICFA’s Moving Image Collection, please see our website or Vimeo album.

Symposium — Miracles and Wonders in Antiquity and Byzantium

University of Cyprus, 16-18 October 2014

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

Miracles and Wonders in Antiquity and Byzantium

                               

Tales of miracle and wonder decorate both ancient and Byzantine literature and seem to have had a great impact upon ancient and Byzantine thought. A strong interest in the wondrous is already apparent in the works of Homer and Hesiod. However, a more organized recording of marvels is detected much later, in Herodotus’s time, when marvelous stories and travel accounts of exotic places and peoples are increasingly produced. From the era of Alexander and onwards such stories are recruited by historians and rhetors in an attempt to apotheose the ideal ruler.

Between the third century BC and the third century AD, the genre of paradoxography, collections of stories relating strange events and phenomena, achieves great popularity, and influences another new genre, the Hellenistic novel. At about the same time, a number of stories circulate that relate the miraculous healings of suffering people who practice incubation in Asclepian temples. Later the practice of incubation is taken over by Christian pilgrims who are cured by saints. Miraculous healings and other types of miracles that are associated with a particular Christian shrine become the material of a new genre, the miracle collection which is cultivated throughout the Byzantine era. Miracle stories are included in all Byzantine hagiographical genres, since they constitute the strongest sign of holiness. Miracles and wonders are also found in profane Byzantine genres, such as chronicles and romances.

Despite the fact that marvel literature enjoyed such a high popularity in antiquity and Byzantium, it has been mostly dismissed by modern scholars as debased, boring and even unintelligible, an attitude that has condemned this literature to obscurity.

The conference’s main aims are to bring to light miracle and wonder literature and to open up new avenues of approach. Topics of exploration may include:

• Literary Theoretical Approaches

• Cultural Studies

• Psychological Approaches

• Comparative Literary Studies

• Linguistics

Specialists are invited to submit a thirty-minute paper in English on a relevant topic.

Due to budgetary constraints, the organizers cannot cover the speakers’ travel and hotel costs. There is no registration fee for participation or attendance.

Prospective speakers are asked to submit by 30 April 2014 a title and a 400-word abstract to Stavroula Constantinou (konstans@ucy.ac.cy) and Maria Gerolemou (mariagerolemou@live.de).