Byzantium & Friends

A conversation with Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) about the invention of the idea of the Italian Renaissance and the functions that it serves in the western historical imagination. "Byzantium" i…

A conversation with Anastasia Koumousi (Director of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Achaea, Greek Ministry of Culture) about the recently identified portrait of the last emperor of the Romans in Const…

A conversation with Alasdair Grant (University of Hamburg) about the captivity and enslavement that many Greeks (Romaioi) experienced in the late medieval period, a period of state collapse during wh…

A conversation with Ioanna Sitaridou (University of Cambridge) about a Greek language (Romeyka) still spoken in northwestern Turkey, though now endangered, whose grammar retains interesting archaic f…

Winston Berg is a political scientist (University of Chicago) who studies modern American conspiracy theories about politics and the deep state; his dissertation studied the movement known as QAnon. …

A conversation with Cliff Ando (University of Chicago) about the revenue models of American research universities and the dangers to advanced research posed by the freezes recently placed on federal …

A conversation with Gavin Kelly (University of Edinburgh) about the corpus of Latin literature from antiquity down to the present, where we discuss the reasons why most scholars focus on the period b…

A conversation with Tina Sessa (The Ohio State University) and Marion Kruse (University of Cincinnati) on the process of peer-review in the humanities: what it's for, how it can be done well, and whe…

A conversation with Adam Morin (University of Ioannina) about categories of taste, the meal structure, and the food and ingredients that east Romans ate. What foods were prized and what looked down u…

A conversation with Ahmad Al-Jallad (The Ohio State University) about the languages and inscriptions of pre-Islamic Arabia, our main contemporary source for life, death, and worship before the time o…

A conversation with Sverrir Jakobsson (University of Iceland) about the experiences of Northmen -- especially Varangians -- who traveled to Constantinople and the south and returned home with stories…

A conversation with Johanna Hanink (Brown University) on Greek literature (ancient, modern, and in-between), on publishing outside one's main area of academic expertise, and on podcasting. Johanna is…

A conversation with Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) about organized labor groups in the Roman empire. Ancient occupational groups often formed associations (sometimes called collegia) which are often…

A conversation with Paul Magdalino (St. Andrews and Koç University) about the literary traditions and genres that Constantinopolitans developed to talk about the origins, history, cosmic importance, …

A conversation with Hannah Moots (Center for Palaeogenetics, Stockholm) about paleogenetic research, its goals, methods, and conclusions. What does it mean to study ancient DNA, and what does it tell…

A conversation with Maroula Perisanidi (University of Leeds) about the distinctive kind of masculinity that was fashioned by scholars and priests in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the challenges…

A conversation with Maggie Popkin (Case Western Reserve University) about souvenirs in the Roman world, how they tie in with city identities and city branding, and the experience of travel. These por…

A conversation with Thomas Barfield (Boston University) about a distinctive category of empires that he has proposed in a new book, Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History (Princeton Universi…

A conversation with Nancy Bisaha (Vassar College) about the origins of the idea of "Europe" as a place of identity and not just geography. One of its first theorists was the Italian humanist Aeneas P…

A conversation with Eleanor Dickey (University of Reading) on Latin words in ancient and Byzantine Greek. Eleanor has tracked them down and compiled them in a specialized dictionary, where she also o…