Moving Byzantium, sessions at the 2023 International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 3–6, 2023

“Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructures and Personal Agency” had a successful five-year run at the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences from 2015 to 2021, while it was funded through the Wittgenstein-Prize, the highest scholarly award of Austria, which was bestowed on Prof. Claudia Rapp in 2015. It demonstrated the crucial importance of these issues for our understanding of the Middle Ages, especially from the vantage point of Byzantium.

In order to foster the research questions and methodological approaches of the project also after the end of the funding period and to continue discussion and cooperation with the scientific community of medieval and Byzantine studies (and beyond), we plan to organize two sessions under the label “Moving Byzantium” at the International Medieval Congress 2023 at the University of Leeds, the largest scholarly gathering of its kind in Europe. The special (but not exclusive) thematic strand for the IMC 2023 is “Networks and Entanglements”.

We invite scholars at all career stages to submit proposals for fifteen-minute papers connected with the main topics of “Moving Byzantium”, with a particular focus on aspects of geographical, social and cultural mobility within and beyond the Byzantine Empire. We are particularly interested in research based on new material, novel interpretations and innovative methods which also locates Byzantium and its neighbours in a wider comparative framework.