The famous adage that history is written by the victors may have become a truism, but the voices of conquered people have never been fully silenced – rather, we may not have been interested in hearing them. All too often, historiography (by no means limited to Byzantine studies) has focused on great-man histories, impersonal studies of societies, or the “longue durée,” all modes that diminish the importance of subjective individual experiences of people who were not great or who were not men.
On 16 and 17 April 2021 hold via Zoom, the symposium “On Being Conquered in Byzantium” aims to refocus the collective scholarly gaze of Byzantinists away from the victors in war and toward the vanquished; away from heroes and rulers and toward victims and casualties; away from the political, economic, historical, and social causes of war and toward the personal and subjective experience of it; away from the insistence of dominant voices and toward the recuperation of marginalized ones.
Bringing together twelve specialists in literature, history, art history, and contemporary cultural theory, this symposium seeks to better understand both how Byzantines themselves understood being conquered and, as importantly, what being conquered in Byzantium can mean for us now. The Symposiarch is Adam J. Goldwyn from the North Dakota State University.
Awards are available for graduate and advanced undergraduate students. To learn more and apply for the awards click here.
To attend the symposium, you can register online.
Here you find more information about the important collection of Byzantine coins Dumbarton Oaks.
