The Medieval Academy Blog

Call for Applications: Mary Jaharis Center Grants 2026–2027

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce its 2026–2027 grant competition.

Mary Jaharis Center Co-Funding Grants promote Byzantine studies in North America. These grants provide co-funding to organize scholarly gatherings (e.g., workshops, seminars, small conferences) in North America that advance scholarship in Byzantine studies broadly conceived. We are particularly interested in supporting convenings that build diverse professional networks that cross the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines, propose creative approaches to fundamental topics in Byzantine studies, or explore new areas of research or methodologies.

Mary Jaharis Center Dissertation Grants are awarded to advanced graduate students working on Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. These grants are meant to help defray the costs of research-related expenses, e.g., travel, photography/digital images, microfilm.

Mary Jaharis Center Publication Grants support book-length publications or major articles in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. Grants are aimed at early career academics. Preference will be given to postdocs and assistant professors, though applications from non-tenure track faculty and associate and full professors will be considered. We encourage the submission of first-book projects.

Mary Jaharis Center Project Grants support discrete and highly focused professional projects aimed at the conservation, preservation, and documentation of Byzantine archaeological sites and monuments dated from 300 CE to 1500 CE primarily in Greece and Turkey. Projects may be small stand-alone projects or discrete components of larger projects. Eligible projects might include archeological investigation, excavation, or survey; documentation, recovery, and analysis of at risk materials (e.g., architecture, mosaics, paintings in situ); and preservation (i.e., preventive measures, e.g., shelters, fences, walkways, water management) or conservation (i.e., physical hands-on treatments) of sites, buildings, or objects.

The application deadline for all grants is February 1, 2026. For further information, please visit the Mary Jaharis Center website: https://maryjahariscenter.org/grants.

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center, with any questions.

Online Lecture: Learning Late Antiquity: The Quarry Church at Deir al-Ganadla and the Lost Timber Nave

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture and the Mashtot Chair of Armenian Studies at Harvard University are pleased to announce the next lecture in the 2025–2026 East of Byzantium lecture series.

December 9, 2025 | Zoom | 12:00–1:30 pm (Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5)
The Quarry Church at Deir al-Ganadla (Asyut, Middle Egypt) and the Lost Timber Nave
Mikael Muehlbauer, Columbia University

This presentation presents the little-known Quarry church of Mary at Deir al-Ganadla (near Asyut) as a tool for students of Late Antiquity to visualize lost timber-roofed basilicas in Egypt as well as the Mediterranean more broadly. The church’s value lies in its mural program, which orders the Pharaonic mine from which it was consecrated into a fictive freestanding basilica. These paintings depict painted timber ephemera from circa 500 that are largely lost to us. By fully documenting this largely unknown church and its decorative schema we may reconstruct elements of freestanding basilicas in Egypt and the wider Mediterranean which lack extant naves. Although modest, Ganadla’s import should not be understated, as it is the most in-tact Late Antique church in Egypt known.

Mikael Muehlbauer is Lecturer in the Discipline of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. He is a specialist in the architecture of Medieval Ethiopia, Egypt and the textile arts of the Western Indian Ocean world.

Advance registration required. Register: https://eastofbyzantium.org/upcoming-events/

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

Online Lecture: Worshipping the Mother Goddess: An Underground Cult Complex in Late Antique Aphrodisias

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce the next lecture in our 2025–2026 lecture series.

December 2, 2025 | Zoom | 12:00–1:30 pm (Eastern Standard Time, UTC -5)
Worshipping the Mother Goddess: An Underground Cult Complex in Late Antique Aphrodisias
Ine Jacobs, University of Oxford

Excavations in a suburban neighborhood of Aphrodisias have revealed a remarkably well-preserved underground cult complex dedicated to the Anatolian mother goddess Kybele. Concealed within the basement level of a large late antique private mansion—strategically positioned between the residence’s public quarters and an east–west street—the complex consists of a spacious central cult chamber, several smaller subsidiary rooms, a long subterranean corridor, and a lightwell that, in its final phase, was sealed and adapted for communal dining. To date, the sanctuary has been traced over an area of 26 by 15 meters, though it almost certainly extended further.

Originally established in the imperial period, the complex underwent several renovations in Late Antiquity, including a near-total rebuilding in the later 5th century. The sanctuary in this form remained active into the early 7th century, until the mansion that housed it was abruptly destroyed by fire in 617. Excavations have yielded a rich assemblage of cult equipment, including four statuettes of Kybele, effigies of other deities, three enigmatic “mountain busts,” amulets, numerous ceramic incense burners, ceramic and copper-alloy lamps, and copper-alloy tableware.

This presentation examines the architectural setting of the complex, structural features, cultic imagery, associated material culture, and the broader social and religious conditions at Aphrodisias that allowed pagan worship to endure into the 7th century.

Ine Jacobs is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Associate Professor of Byzantine Archaeology and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford.

Advance registration required. Register: https://maryjahariscenter.org/events/worshipping-the-mother-goddess

Contact Brandie Ratliff (mjcbac@hchc.edu), Director, Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture with any questions.

International Medieval Society–Paris, Annual Orientation Aperitif

I am delighted to announce that IMS-Paris’s annual Paris orientation Aperitif will take place this year on Tuesday, 18 November at 18h00 chez Kristin Hoefener near Republique. We will be joined by Professors Kristine Tanton and Meredith Cohen! Whether it is your first ever research trip to Paris or you have been researching here for 30+ years, we want to hear from you. Please come with your questions and/or your valuable experience. Please let me know if you can make it.

Please RSVP to Anna Russakoff at annadrussakoff@gmail.com

ALSO: if you are going to be in Paris this year and would like to give a talk at any of our aperitifs, please let Anna know. It is a nice no-stress way to present current research projects or run-throughs for conference papers.

If you have recently seen a major research project to completion, please let us know!  The 2026 Medieval Academy meeting on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College (March 19–21, 2026) will feature two sessions celebrating “New Scholarship.”  The sessions will take place during the regularly scheduled MAA program and will provide an opportunity for us to learn about each other’s recent publications or other projects and to celebrate these research milestones together.  If you would like to participate in this session, in which individual members will briefly present (ca. 5-10 mins) a major publication or publicly available project, please reach out to Fiona Griffiths (fgriffit@stanford.edu) and Cecilia Gaposchkin (cecilia.gaposchkin@dartmouth.edu) by December 12, 2025 with an expression of interest and brief description of the work.  All members with recently completed major projects are warmly welcome.  Notifications will be sent out in early January 2026.