Narrative Exchanges between Byzantium and Armenia: Contact, Conflict, & Connotation. A workshop for postgraduate and early-career scholars. Uppsala University, March 16–17, 2017

The shifting borderland between Byzantine and Armenian culture-complexes in Eastern Anatolia and the Armenian plateau was a site of contact and conflict, alliances made and discarded, cultural exchange and cultural imperialism. This two-day workshop will explore narratives of exchange and conflict between Byzantium and Armenia, broadly defined: narrative in its largest and most productive sense of telling stories; and 'Byzantium' and 'Armenia' encompassing the encounter in the frontier zone, the presence of Armenians in Byzantine society, the exchange of ideas, relics, language, and persons over cultural and cultic boundaries, and the perils and problems of annexation, imperialism(s), and survival.

Papers given at this workshop should explore the narrative process behind these moments of contact and conflict. Possible angles of approach might include: the enshrinement of memory (in historiography, relics, art); self-fashioning of Byzantine and Armenian 'border-crossers'; the process of translation; narratives of enmity or of conversion; nationalist narratives (their problems and their benefits); self-fashioning of modern 'Armenologists' and 'Byzantinologists' with reference to what we might gain from one another – amongst other topics.