Organized by Prof. Teresa Shawcross

Sponsored by: Center for Collaborative History | Department of Art & Archaeology | Department of Religion | Humanities Council | Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) | Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies | University Center for Human Values 

This is a conference on the medieval history of the Black Sea. Current conflict -- especially around Crimea and Ukraine --  is leading us to rethink the epistemological categories we use to take about the region.  Many of these are a legacy of the Cold War era. Using the lenses of the history of migration, of the silk route and of slavery, we hope to launch a new approach to an understanding of the past. The core of our invited speakers are housed in history departments. Because literacy was spread very unevenly across different ethnic groups and social strata in the region, however, we are also inviting key scholars who work more directly on the material evidence (e.g. archaeological, numismatic) and who may therefore be housed in other departments or have curatorial positions. We hope that this will allow us to build up a picture that does not privilege the histories of elites, but rather allows us to point to the experiences of non-elites, such as enslaved persons.