The 19th Annual CBOMGS Postgraduate Colloquium

2nd June 2018

The Committee is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the 19th Postgraduate Colloquium of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.

The concepts of hurt, trauma and healing cross between the different disciplines that deal with Eastern Mediterranean. The colloquium aims to explore transformations and multifarious dimensions of the notions of trauma and wreckage, and their opposition, healing, from the Late Antiquity to the Present.

Whilst serving as antitheses to one another they are also complementary. After destruction and breakage, comes the need for repair. However, when a broken textile’s ripped edges are joined again, the visible seam signifies the damage that has happened. Trauma and healing are key concepts in medicine, psychology, and sociology. However, political ideology has constantly used them in order to justify the rising and the existence of authoritarian regimes. In the past, medicine, saints, and magic offered different ways for healing the body and the soul. The current aim of restoration practices is to heal remnants of cultural heritage after damage and to prevent damage with appropriate conservation strategies.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Healing power of saints and healing people in society;
• Medicine and magic;
• Cultural heritage and material culture: restoration and preservation practices, as well as preventive actions for the preservation;
• The individual aspects of trauma, especially in relation to the politics of gender, sexuality, class, race, and identity (sexual abuse, domestic violence, shame and fear, death and mourning or melancholia);
• Collective experiences of trauma (war, genocide, terrorism, victims and perpetrators, practices of memory and oblivion);
• Migration from the Late Antiquity to the current migration crisis and harrowing events in refugee camps;
• Public health and medical, therapeutic approaches to illnesses and trauma;
• Texts and images related to medical practices

Papers of approximately 20 minutes related to any of the fields covered by Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies are welcome. Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words no later than Saturday 21st April 2018 to 2018cbomgscolloquium@gmail.com.  Applicants will be notified of selection by 28th April 2018.