[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Workshop: April 15, 2016

Dimitri H. Gondicas gondicas at Princeton.EDU
Fri Apr 8 08:52:05 PDT 2016




PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies



Workshop



Byzantium in the Balkans:

Memories of an Empire


Lee Mordechai
History




The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire is among the most long-lived political entities in history, having existed and developed for over two millenia (c. 750 BC - 1453/1461 AD), influencing both Europe and the Middle East. Despite its astounding longevity and continuing impact on Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, felt to this day, Byzantium remains largely forgotten, especially in the public sphere. My presentation will examine the public historical memory of the Byzantine Empire in some of its former Balkan territories which remained under its control for centuries. I will survey the variety of approaches modern countries in the region use when addressing their historical and cultural heritages concerning the Byzantine Empire, often either appropriating it idiosyncratically or attempting to abandon it, processes shaped by a combination of nationalism, politics, tourism and the powerful western historiography. For an effective contrast, I will compare the strategies of memory employed towards the Byzantine Empire to those applied to its Roman predecessor, far better known and represented in popular culture and both lay and scholarly literature. By doing so, I will highlight what these modern societies choose to embrace and remember, and just as importantly, what they prefer to erase and forget.


Lee Mordechai is a fifth year graduate student at the History Department at Princeton. He is currently writing his dissertation, Emperors and Elites in the Eleventh Century Eastern Roman Empire, which carefully investigates the social and political changes of the period against the backdrop of the eleventh century upheavals in the Eastern Mediterranean. Lee is involved in several other projects; he is the director and manager of FLAME, a digital humanities project that reconstructs the late antique and early medieval economy and includes twenty five scholars and staff members in Princeton and beyond. Lee is also involved with the PIIRS Climate Change and History Research Initiative, where he looks into the Byzantine Empire's resilience to short-term cataclysmic events such as earthquakes. This talk is part of his second main project, in which he examines the modern construction of the historical memory of Byzantium in its former territories' contemporary public space.



Friday, April 15, 2016

1:30 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103

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