Byzantium & Friends

A conversation with Tina Sessa (Ohio State University: see episode 4) and Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma, author of The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton Univer…

A conversation with Jennifer Davis (Catholic University of America) on the study of empire in a medieval context, contrasting the different ways in which Charlemagne and the Byzantine emperors ran th…

A conversation with Buket Kitapçı Bayrı (Koç University) about Turkish films that prominently feature Byzantine characters and settings, especially the films about Battal Gazi. For links to these fil…

A conversation with Cecily Hilsdale (McGill University) about the coping strategies that late Byzantium used to counter, ameliorate, and reverse its imperial decline. We talk about the concepts of de…

A conversation with Garth Fowden (University of Cambridge) about how the peoples of the Caucasus (Armenians, Georgians, and Albanians) coped with living between two empires, how those empires sought …

A conversation with Elizabeth Key Fowden (University of Cambridge) on the Parthenon mosque and Athens under the Ottomans. When the Parthenon was done being a Christian church (which lasted from the f…

A conversation with Marion Kruse (University of Cincinnati) about his book The Politics of Roman Memory: From the Fall of the Western Empire to the Age of Justinian (University of Pennsylvania Press …

A conversation with Stephen Morris (independent scholar) about the attitudes toward (male) homosexuality in different sites of Byzantine culture and the prospects for an orthodox recognition of same-…

A conversation with Sofia Torallas Tovar (University of Chicago) and David Brakke (The Ohio State University) about Coptic Egypt, the life and works of Shenute the Great, and how Coptic and Byzantine…

A conversation with Siren Çelik (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University) about the new generation of Turkish Byzantine scholars, and the paths by which one might come to study Byzantiu…

A conversation with Steven Smith (Hofstra University) about worldly and sinful epigrams from the sixth century that talk about love, sex, food, and other pleasures, based on his book Greek Epigram an…

Could one rise from a provincial town to a position of power and wealth in the capital without having a military career? How did Byzantine men of affairs in the eleventh century invest their new-foun…

A conversation with Paroma Chatterjee (University of Michigan) on Indian perspectives and approaches to Byzantium. What we might be taking for granted in a field whose appeal has been traditionally l…

A conversation with Bissera Pentcheva (Stanford University) about the sensory and spiritual experience of Hagia Sophia, where architecture, sound, and light met theology and prayer, based on her book…

A conversation with Christian Raffensperger (Wittenberg University) about the kingdom (yes, the kingdom) of Rus' and our concept of "medieval Europe," its potential and current limitations, based on …

A conversation about Armenian art, ancient and Christian, with Christina Maranci (Tufts University), based on her book The Art of Armenia: An Introduction (Oxford University Press 2018).

A conversation about western fantasies, orientalism, and the making of Byzantium, with Elena Boeck (DePaul University), based on her two articles: 'Fantasy, Supremacy, Domes, and Dames: Charlemagne g…

A conversation about the new environmental history of late antiquity with Kristina Sessa (The Ohio State University), based on her article 'The New Environmental Fall of Rome: A Methodological Consid…

A conversation about the Fourth Crusade and colonial / postcolonial theory with George Demacopoulos (Fordham University), based on his book Colonizing Christianity: Greek and Latin Religious Identity…

A conversation about death and the imagination with Ellen Muehlberger (University of Michigan), based on her book Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and its Consequences in Late Antique Christianity…