A Twelfth-Century Slavonic Ekphrasis of Hippodrome Scenes in the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Kyiv?, Third Annual Public Lecture in Medieval & Early Modern Slavonic Studies by Robert Romanchuk (Florida State University) and Brad Hostetler (Kenyon College), Alison Richard Building, University of Cambridge, October 31, 2018, 5:00–6:30 pm

Robert Romanchuk and Brad Hostetler together will deliver a lecture on evidence preserved in Rus literature of contemporary speech about the famous image of the Constantinopolitan Hippodrome games in Kyiv’s Saint Sophia Cathedral. Their work discloses the interest of Kyivan Rus elites in Constantinopolitan entertainments and performance of power. Please join us for this special public lecture which spans the disciplines of literary and art historical studies, as well as Byzantine and Medieval Slavonic studies.

Robert Romanchuk is a philologist. He has published the monograph Byzantine Hermeneutics and Pedagogy in the Russian North: Monks and Masters at the Kirillo-Belozerskii Monastery, 1397–1501 (U. Toronto Press, 2007) and a number of book chapters and journal publications, most recently chapters on the literature of Mount Athos for David Wallace’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348–1418 (Oxford UP, 2016) and on “lettered education” in Kyivan Rus for the English translation of Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s History of Ukraine-Rus, vol. 3 (ed. Frank Sysyn: CIUS, 2016). He is preparing a critical edition of the Byzantine romantic epic Digenis Akritis in its Old Slavonic translation, “The Deeds of the Brave Men of Old.” He also works in psychoanalysis and literature.

Brad Hostetler is an art historian whose research focuses on relics and reliquaries, text and image relationships, and patronage practices in the Byzantine Empire. He has held fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His current book project examines the design and use of reliquaries in Byzantium after Iconoclasm and before the Fourth Crusade. He looks at the ways in which these objects mediated the viewer’s access to, and veneration of, sacred matter in personal devotion and public ceremonial.