Connecting Late Antiquities, University of Bonn, February 3–5, 2025

Paper proposals are cordially invited for a conference on Connecting Late Antiquities, to be held at the University of Bonn, 3-5 February 2025.

Connecting Late Antiquities, generously sponsored by Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, is a collaborative project to create open, digital prosopographical resources for the Roman and post-Imperial territories between the third and seventh centuries. Its main aim is to digitise, unite, and link existing resources to make them more accessible and enhance their reach and utility. The enterprise will dramatically improve access to information about late-antique people for all scholars of this period and allow the easy integration of prosopographical material with online geographical, textual, epigraphic, and papyrological resources.

Technological developments have provided new opportunities for prosopography, including allowing for both constant updating and an expansion beyond the traditional focus on the higher echelons of society. The Prosopography of the Byzantine Empire and Prosopography of the Byzantine World projects provide excellent examples of the greater possibilities allowed by this approach. Connecting Late Antiquities will draw together material from a variety of major printed prosopographies and specialist digital databases, as well as incorporating entries for 'non-elite' individuals who are attested in ancient sources but have not been included in earlier publications. This approach will allow more extensive research into understudied figures and their social connections.

We have a limited number of slots for papers of up to 20 minutes in length. We invite colleagues to submit abstracts on any aspect of Late Antique prosopography.

We particularly welcome submissions suggesting new discoveries and approaches within the following themes:

• Prosopography and the rise of literature in Late Antique local languages, both western (e.g. Irish, Pictish, Welsh) and eastern (e.g. Armenian, Coptic, Syriac).
• Prosopography and the ‘usual suspects’ (aristocracies, rulers, office-holders, etc.).
• Prosopography and the ‘unusual suspects’ (e.g. anonymous individuals, marginalised individuals, religious minorities, non-privileged groups).
• Prosopography and gender.
• Prosopography and the challenges, limits, and opportunities of digital humanities.
• Methodological avenues to overcome traditional prosopographical segregations (e.g. clerical/secular, elite/lower-status, human/non-human).