Blood in Byzantium, 52nd Annual Spring Symposium of the Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, Churchill College and Trinity College, Cambridge, March 30–April 1, 2019

In 2019, the SPBS Spring Symposium will be returning to Cambridge for the first time since 1990. The theme which has been chosen is ‘Blood in Byzantium’. This theme will facilitate inter-disciplinary discussion of research and ideas embracing Byzantine religion, art history, military history, social history, and law, as well Byzantine medicine and philosophy, drawing upon the extensive theoretical and historical literature that has emerged on the body, blood, and medicine in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but which has yet to be systematically applied to Byzantium and its neighbours. Sessions will be arranged around the themes of ‘The Blood of Christ’; ‘The Blood of the Martyrs’; ‘Blood, Dynasty and Kinship’; ‘Bloodshed’; and ‘Blood in Medicine, Philosophy and Art’.

The main sessions of the conference will be held at Churchill College, with a reception and dinner at Trinity College.

Confirmed speakers include Claudia Rapp, Jane Baun, Phil Booth, Ioannis Pappadogiannakis, Stavroula Constantinou, Anne Alwis, Elena Draghici-Vasilescu, Caroline Goodson, Philip Wood, Nick Evans, Ruth Macrides, Andrew Marsham, Peter Frankopan, Alexandra Vukovich, Teresa Shawcross, Theodora Antonopoulou, Mike Humphreys, Maroula Perisnadi, Yannis Stouraitis, Petros Bouras-Vallianatos, Rebecca Flemming and Barbara Zipser.

The 52nd Spring Symposium invites Communications (of 10 minutes in duration) on current research and warmly invites abstracts (of not more than 500 words) from scholars within and without the UK and in fields linked to Byzantine studies.