Nicholas S M Matheou

From Constantinople to the Frontier: The City and the Cities provides twenty-five articles addressing the concept of centres and peripheries in the late antique and Byzantine worlds, focusing specifically on urban aspects of this paradigm. Spanning from the fourth to thirteenth centuries, and ranging from the later Roman empires to the early Caliphate and medieval New Rome, the chapters reveal the range of factors involved in the dialectic between City, cities, and frontier.
Including contributions on political, social, literary, and artistic history, and covering geographical areas throughout the central and eastern Mediterranean, this volume provides a kaleidoscopic view of how human actions and relationships worked with, within, and between urban spaces and the periphery, and how these spaces and relationships were themselves ideologically constructed and understood.
Contributors are Walter F. Beers, Lorenzo M. Bondioli, Christopher Bonura, Lynton Boshoff, Averil Cameron, Jeremiah Coogan, Robson Della Torre, Pavla Drapelova, Nicholas Evans, David Gyllenhaal, Franka Horvat, Theofili Kampianaki, Maximilian Lau, Valeria Flavia Lovato, Byron MacDougall, Nicholas S.M. Matheou, Daniel Neary, Jonas Nilsson, Cecilia Palombo, Maria Alessia Rossi, Roman Shliakhtin, Sarah C. Simmons, Andrew M. Small, Jakub Sypiański, Vincent Tremblay and Philipp Winterhager.

In this first podcast produced by the Long History of Identity, Ethnicity and Nationhood Research Network, co-convener Nicholas Matheou talks to Florin Curta on the topic of ‘Genetics, the Archaeology of Ethnicity, and Nationhood.’ Florin is professor of Medieval History & Archaeology at the University of Florida, and has published widely on the Balkans, Slavic identities, the early and central medieval steppe world, as well as theoretical approaches to the archaeology of ethnicity. Here he discusses how new genetic and biological approaches are creating new possibilities and avenues for research, what the most useful of these approaches might be, and their methodological pitfalls. In a wide-ranging conversation, encompassing DNA studies, isotope analysis, and the instrumentalisation of research by various movements, Florin outlines a broad and nuanced perspective on the many approaches to, and uses of genetics and archaeology in the construction of ethnicity and nationhood.

http://torch.ox.ac.uk/genetics-archaeology-ethnicity-and-nationhood

Empire is often seen as ‘multi-ethnic’ or ‘non-national’ by definition, yet countless pre-modern and modern imperial polities are characterised as the projects of particular ‘peoples’, and were also fundamental in ethno-national construction of subject populations. This round table, organised by the TORCH research network ‘The long history of identity, ethnicity and nationhood’, directly addressed these apparent paradoxes through comparative discussion of empire’s role in identity formation across time and place. Our discussion pursued two main goals. First, we wanted to get away from the simplistic understanding of imperial identity as ‘civic’ by definition and examine ethnic notions and discourse in the construction of imperial polities and identities. Second, we wanted to understand how imperial languages created ethnic and national identities both within and outsides imperial borders. This podcast includes Ilya Afanasyev’s thematic introduction to the round table, longer papers on Ancient Rome, late medieval and early modern Iran and early modern Russia by Emma Dench (Harvard University), Florian Schwarz (Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna) and Michael Khodarkovsky (Loyola University Chicago), and shorter interventions on Late Antiquity, medieval Britain, Spanish colonialism, and post-colonial African nationalism by Bryan Ward-Perkins, Eliza Hartrich, Elisabeth Bolorinos Allard and Miles Larmer (all – University of Oxford).

This one-day workshop was focused on speakers of the Middle East’s major Indo-European languages, and took an explicitly comparative approach to the strategies and modes by which actors and communities constructed resultant identities. The workshop was broken down into three sessions each containing an Armenian, Kurdish and Iranian specialist, addressing how processes of self-definition, socio-political mobilisation and group formation are reflected in their linguistic, cultural and chronological foci. Ranging from the First Millennium A.D. to the 21st Century, the exciting presentations demonstrated clearly the enormous value of a de-centred, nuanced, and critical approach to issues of identity, ethnicity and nationhood across time and place.

For more details and the recordings please visit: http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/identity

This workshop is focused on so-called ‘artificial nations’, states either disappeared or in existence today that are perceived as contrary to their ‘natural’ disposition, whether by origin or borders. It takes a comparative, critical approach across different times and places, aiming to both historicise the notion of artificial states and borders, and to deconstruct methodological nationalism inherent in this notion.

'The long history of identity, ethnicity and nationhood' research network, hosted by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and Birmingham Research Institute for History and Cultures (BRIHC), is organising a series of sessions at the IMC 2017, focusing on the reproduction of collective identities in the middle ages. While a generic constructivist approach is widely shared in research on pre-modern identities, it often remains uncritical. On the one hand, it sometimes conceals latent essentialism (best represented by the formula 'identities are constructed, but having been constructed become real'), and, on the other hand, restricts our capacity to arrive at a systemic understanding of how exactly collective identities are asserted and reproduced over long periods of time. Hence, our main goal is to tackle the difficult question of long-term reproduction of the same projected identities, often alongside broadly similar constructs, without resorting to essentialist or objectifying explanations. We invite paper proposals focused on any period and region of medieval history exploring how a particular concept of identification, collective identity or polity was reproduced, imposed and reimagined over a long period of time. What were the material, political, intellectual and cultural conditions in which a particular identity can be reasserted and reinterpreted in the longue durée? What theoretical lenses can we use to make sense of certain identities' persistence, if we accept the contingent and constructed nature of any collective identity and political organisation? Paper proposals addressing these and related questions should be sent to identity@torch.ox.ac.uk by Monday August 22.

This workshop is focused on the interplay between civic and ethnic identities – two forms of collective belonging usually seen as fundamentally different – and takes a comparative approach to their construction in urban contexts from Archaic Greece to the Ottoman Empire. The registration fee is £10, and coffee breaks, lunches, and a wine reception will be provided. In order to attend please RSVP to identity@torch.ox.ac.uk by Sunday the 6th of March.

Original call for papers:

In spite of the stream of publications over the last thirty years on ancient and medieval ethnicity and national identity, the dominant paradigm in ethnicity and nationalism studies remains modernist – the view that nationhood is an essentially modern phenomenon and was non-existent or peculiarly unimportant before the 18th century. We believe it is time to reopen this debate. Scholars working on pre-modern collective identities too often avoid the challenge of modernism, either by using allegedly unproblematic terminology of ethnicity or by employing the vocabulary of nationhood uncritically. This conference, therefore, aims at tackling these difficult theoretical issues head on. This can only truly be achieved by bringing together a range of researchers working on ancient, late antique, early medieval, high medieval, late medieval, and early modern ethnicity and nationhood. Thus we hope to reinvigorate discussion of pre-modern ethnicity and nationhood, as well as to go beyond the unhelpful chronological divisions which have emerged through surprisingly fragmented research on pre-modern collective identities. Overall, the goal of our conference is to encourage systemic conceptual thinking about pre-modern identity and nationhood, and to consider the similarities and differences between the construction and use of ethnic and national categories both within those periods, and in comparison with modernity.