You are kindly invited to the workshop entitled \u2018Materialising the Edges of Empire?\u2019 organized by the Department of History, in collaboration with Ko\u00e7 University, ANAMED, and University of Birmingham.<\/p>\n
Date: 24 February 2026, Tuesday
\nAvenue: C Block Amphi<\/p>\n
Title: Materialising the Edges of Empire?<\/p>\n
Speakers: Rebecca Darley (ANAMED\/Krea University), Ferm\u00fcde Gulsevin\u00e7 (ANAMED), Tura\u00e7 Hakalmaz (Ba\u015fkent University), Ivana Jevti\u00e7 (Ko\u00e7 University), Pelin Yoncanci (METU), Daniel Reynolds (University of Birmingham), Irakli Tezelashvili (ANAMED\/The Courtauld Institute of Art), Luca Zavagno (Bilkent University), Owen Miller (Bilkent University)<\/p>\n
Workshop\u2019s Program:
\n\u2022 9:30 Welcome and Coffee \u2022 10:00 Opening remarks \u2022 10:30 Panel One (paired discussion + open discussion): Ferm\u00fcde Gulsevin\u00e7, Ivana Jevti\u00e7 \u2022 11:30 Coffee break \u2022 12:00 Panel Two: Luca Zavagno and Owen Miller \u2022 13:00 Lunch \u2022 14:00 Panel Three: Rebecca Darley, Pelin Yoncanci, Tura\u00e7 Hakalmaz \u2022 15:30 Coffee break \u2022 15:45 Panel Four: Dan Reynolds, and Irakli Tezelashvili \u2022 16:45 Plenary discussion \/ roundtable \u2022 17:30 (approx.) Closing remarks \u2022 Evening Dinner<\/p>\n
Abstract:
\nOver the last decades, Byzantine studies have expressed a tension in the field that directly reflects the traces the empire itself has left us. Was Constantinople the beating heart and exclusive source of Byzantine identity, innovation, and, indeed, existence? Or was the empire shaped, sustained, and defined by its diverse and dynamic territorial expanse? On the one hand, it isn\u2019t difficult to find Byzantine intellectuals bemoaning distance from the capital (as like unto death itself!) or heaping praise on the metropole as the source of all that is good. On the other hand, material sources, especially, testify to vibrant cultural production all across the empire and along its borders, which combined local and metropolitan currents in distinctive ways. In scholarship, this dichotomy is variously expressed. Art historical attributions regularly reinforce a metropolitan focus by insisting that \u2018lower quality\u2019 work must inevitably have been \u2018provincial\u2019 (rather than simply \u2018less good\u2019) and, conversely, that anything of the highest quality must have come from Constantinople. Scholarly traditions rooted in the erstwhile imperial \u2018peripheries\u2019, conversely, can perpetuate parochial assertions of uniqueness that overlook or obscure transregional inspiration drawn from empire-wide phenomena. In this one-day workshop, we seek to explore the materialisation of empire at its geographical edges, using specific objects and our various specialisms in Byzantium beyond Constantinople to interrogate existing paradigms and potentially suggest new ones for relationships, in the historical past and the scholarly present, rooted in the local and the global, the material and the intellectual, and in the knowingly and implicitly colonial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You are kindly invited to the workshop entitled \u2018Materialising the Edges of Empire?\u2019 organized by the Department of History, in collaboration with Ko\u00e7 University, ANAMED, and University of Birmingham. Date: 24 February 2026, Tuesday Avenue: C Block Amphi Title: Materialising the Edges of Empire? Speakers: Rebecca Darley (ANAMED\/Krea University), Ferm\u00fcde [\u2026] <\/p>\n