Romans in the East, Roman Religion, and Unbecoming Roman, lecture by Leonora Neville (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Bilknet University (Room H-232) and Zoom, December 15, 2023, 12:30 pm (Istanbul)

The 2023-24 Byzantine Seminar Series entitled “Becoming and Unbecoming Roman” organized by the Program of CCI and the Department of History at Bilkent University, in collaboration with IFEA-Istanbul, Hacettepe University, and Koç University will start with the opening lecture by Leonora Neville entitled “Romans in the East, Roman Religion, and Unbecoming Roman” on Friday, 15 December 2023, at 12.30 p.m.(Istanbul Time).

For well over a decade now, Byzantine scholars have sought to answer thorny questions of the Byzantines’ identity: 

• Were they Greeks? Romans? Or something else? 
• A proto-nation state bound by Romanness or an empire held together by elite images of identity projected on heterogenous ethnicities? 
• Were they part of a larger Christian commonwealth? How does their art, literature, and material culture reflect their identity? 
• How does that identity permeate after Byzantium?
• As scholars, should we replace artificial terms such as Byzantium and Byzantine with Rome and Roman? What about Late Antiquity as a concept? 

These questions continue to spark debate in the field and likely will for some time. However, as we come to accept that Byzantines are generally identified as Romans, a number of questions emerge. As we appreciate Romanness, when and how does that Romanity stop? What social factors lead Romans to deny Romanness to others? What does the process of de-Romanization look like in the literary and material domains? Are there sharp breaks in the process or is it one of continuity and transformation? 

This seminar series aims to address a number of these questions, asking us how did one unbecome a Roman? When did people finally answer the question “to be a Roman or not to be a Roman" with a negative answer.