The Ghent Centre for Late Antiquity, Ghent University (https://www.gcla.ugent.be/) is offering four PhD fellowships as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project New Polities. Political Thought in the First Millennium, directed by Prof. P. Van Nuffelen.

The New Polities project studies political thought in Late Antiquity (ca. 300-900 AD). Rather than considering this as the time when the ancient city-state gave way to monarchy and when rationality became subordinate to religious texts, the project argues that we see in Late Antiquity a wide range of new religious and political communities that adopted and modified classical ideas and thus developed a rich political thought. By studying sources in other languages than just Latin and Greek,New Polities will uncover neglected traditions of political thought from the first millennium AD, from the Roman Empire to the Abbasids, Byzantines and Carolingians.

The four PhD students will write a doctoral dissertation on a topic related to the project’s aims, including (but not limited to) concepts of social relations, kingship, utopias, virtue, economic thought and the relation between society and nature. Their topic should relate to sources in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and/or Georgian.

The four PhD students will contribute to a database of commented passages on first millennium political thought and participant in, and co-organize, team meetings, workshops and conferences.