Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval Studies

The Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval Studies cluster provides an ideal environment for anyone who believes that it is of the essence to overcome the constraints and divisions of periodisation in the study of history and culture. In the context of our cluster, we invite and encourage junior researchers to think beyond the arbitrarily imposed boundaries of chronology, geography, language, and academic disciplines: we juxtapose such compartmentalization with defragmentation, connectivity and continuity.

Thematically, the focus of our activities rests on the pre-modern cultures and civilisations of the Mediterranean basin and its adjacent areas and the civilisations, societies, and structures that emerged from, and succeeded, it. Thus our work embraces a period of almost 3,000 years of human history, from the late Bronze Age and the emergence of our earliest written sources up to the end of the Middle Ages, from approximately 1500 BCE to approximately 1500 CE.

The Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval Studies cluster brings together the traditional academic disciplines of Ancient History (including Papyrology and Epigraphy), Etruscology and Italic Studies, Classical Archaeology (including Late Antique and Early Christian Archaeology), Numismatics and Monetary History, Byzantine Studies, Medieval Studies, and Jewish Studies.

In the context of the activities of our Doctoral School, we invite the doctoral researchers of our cluster to place their research in a framework that considers the evolution, connectivities, continuities, and discontinuities in the Ancient, Byzantine, and Medieval worlds. Thus our junior researchers have a unique opportunity to discover the fascinating complexities of our historical, cultural, archaeological, and philological disciplinary approaches as well as their theoretical and practical applications to the textual, iconographic, and material evidence. This includes applications derived from the unfolding world of the Digital Humanities, and it extends to the study of religious history, gender history, and global history just as much as it involves the study of the history of ideas, the history of scholarship, reception studies, and epistemology.