Realism in Hagiography Workshop Announcement

An international workshop titled ‘Realism in Hagiography’ will be hosted at the University of Cologne on 12-13 January 2023. This event is the focus for my three-month Junior Research Fellowship hosted by the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies and partly funded thanks to the Bible in Middle Byzantine Hagiography project co-directed by my host, Prof. Dr. Claudia Sode. The workshop will be a continuation of this year’s IHAC Byzantine Seminar series which Claudia and I also co-hosted along with our colleagues Profs. Staffan Wahlgren (Trondheim) and Li Qiang (NENU).

The origins of this project go back to a paper I gave at the 2019 SPBS Spring Symposium, in which I explored whether descriptions of bloody violence in a few hagiographical texts could be productively interpreted under a ‘realistic’ framework. I met Claudia virtually through last year’s IHAC seminar, and we jointly developed and refined this idea as a project proposal which would bring me to Cologne for a few months. Our proposal (which can be found here) was accepted by the Auerbach Institute, and I arrived at the beginning of November for a three-month stay.

The workshop will bring together 11 other scholars, some based in Cologne and others joining us from across Europe. The format will be pre-circulated papers – we asked everyone to write a draft of their communication in advance which will be shared with other participants. Everyone will have the chance to read all of the other papers before we start. For each presenter’s session, they can give a short introduction, but the majority of our time will be focused on discussing the work which we all had time to read in advance. We see a few advantages with this format. First, since the workshop will be held in English, it improves accessibility by giving additional time for people to process information. Second, this encourages presenters to identify connections between the different papers, helping us better identify core themes across the separate contributions. Third, it will hopefully ease the process of revising these communications for publication, as publishing a volume of the proceedings of this workshop is one of our explicit goals in organizing it.

While all of the presenters will be joining us in-person in Cologne (at the university’s new International House, Kringsweg 6, 50931 Köln), the workshop itself will be hybrid in order to allow colleagues from all over the world, including our Chinese colleagues based at IHAC, to join. Registration is required but free for either in-person for virtual attendance!

November 29th, 2022 by DC Whalin