Each year, the Byzantine Studies Program offers a workshop with the year's Byzantine Studies Fellow. This year's workshop is with our 2025–26 fellow, Christodoulos Papavarnavas, and speakers Juan Signes Codoñer (Complutense University of Madrid), Stephanos Efthymiadis (Open University of Cyprus), and Anthony Kaldellis (University of Chicago).
How to Attend
- In person (with lunch provided): reserve your spot by noon on April 20
- Via Zoom if you cannot attend in person: register for Zoom attendance
Schedule
10:00–10:15 AM Opening Remarks
10:15–11:15 AM
Speaker 1: Christodoulos Papavarnavas, Byzantine Fellow, Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, “The Parasite of Empire: Andronikos and the Spatial Logic of Containment in Niketas Choniates’ History”
About the Talk: Andronikos I Komnenos is one of the most striking figures in Chronike Diegesis, a work in twenty-one books that spans roughly a century, from 1118 to 1206, shortly after the capture of Constantinople in 1204. The career of Andronikos has attracted sustained historical and political analysis. Yet his repeated imprisonments have never been examined as a coherent literary and spatial pattern. This paper offers the first systematic study of these scenes of confinement as a structuring device in Niketas Choniates’ historiography. Drawing on Michel Serres’ theory of the parasite as a disruptive force within a host system, I argue that Andronikos functions as a “spatial parasite” whose mobility repeatedly exposes the fragility of imperial containment. Each imprisonment – whether in the Great Palace, the tower cell with its hidden cavity, the reinforced chains of renewed custody, or the final incarceration in the prison of Anemas – attempts to neutralize him through architectural control. Yet these interiors fail. Secret passages, forged keys, disguises, feigned illness, and performative repentance transform confinement into a site of instability. The empire repeatedly encloses Andronikos, but never succeeds in containing him.
Read collectively, these episodes form a narrative engine: Andronikos becomes a moving boundary who generates spatial disorder both within the story-world and within the structure of the narrative itself, interrupting military campaigns and reorienting political focus. His parasitic mobility turns imprisonment from a sign of sovereign strength into evidence of systemic vulnerability. Spatial disruption thus becomes the language through which Choniates articulates imperial crisis. By foregrounding the poetics of containment, this study demonstrates that Choniates uses the figure of Andronikos to explore the tension between enclosure and instability at the heart of imperial power. The repeated failure of spatial control emerges not as incidental narrative detail, but as a central device through which the historian exposes political fragility.
About the Speaker: Dr. Christodoulos Papavarnavas is a scholar of Byzantine literature and culture, specializing in Byzantine hagiography, with current research expanding into historiography and the romance. He is appointed as a Visiting Assistant Research Professor. His current research explores the meanings and narrative functions of enclosure across three Byzantine genres—hagiography, historiography, and the romance—building on the FWF-funded project at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Spaces that Matter: Enclosed and Secluded Places in Early and Middle Byzantine Hagiography, where he is the project’s lead researcher. He received his Ph.D. in Byzantine Studies from the University of Vienna (2018) sub auspiciis praesidentis, the highest distinction awarded in Austria for academic excellence, and is the recipient of the Grete Mostny Award. He has held research positions at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the University of Oxford, and has taught and published widely on Byzantine literature.
Speaker 2: Stephanos Efthymiadis, Professor in Byzantine Studies, Open University of Cyprus, "Narratives of Confinement in the Syngraphikai Historiai of Georgios Pachymeres"
About the Talk: The Syngraphikai Historiai of Georgios Pachymeres, a historiographical work which covers the period between 1258 and 1307/8, are replete with references to confinement. Whether forms of punishment meant for political opponents or dictated by other purposes, these confinements chiefly implicate the key players of history that marked especially the reign of Michael VIII Palailologos (1259-1282), one of the two emperors dealt with in the Historiai. Seen as a whole, they succeed in transmitting to the reader the climate of political turmoil and mutual suspicion and mistrust that typified the years before and after the restoration of Byzantine rule in Constantinople in 1261. This paper’s aim is to examine the role of these references in the historiographical narrative, comment on their function in the narrative, and try to understand the author’s emotional engagement and/or moral judgement towards the actors of history involved.
About the Speaker: Stephanos Efthymiadis is a Professor at the Open University of Cyprus. He holds a PhD from Oxford University, U.K., and has published numerous studies on Byzantine hagiography, historiography, prosopography, and historical geography. He is the editor of the two-volume Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography (2011–2014). A volume of his collected articles on Byzantine hagiography appeared in 2011 (Variorum Collected Studies Series). His last book, published with Cambridge University Press, is titled The Hagiography of Byzantine Cyprus (Fourth to Thirteenth Century): Saints, Hagiographers and Texts. He is currently working on a monograph on the political and social history of Hagia Sophia of Constantinople (532-1453). Together with Giulia Gollo, he is preparing an edition and annotated translation of the two versions of the Life of Ioannes Pischaites, a saint of the Second Iconoclasm (815-843).
11:15–11:30 AM Coffee
11:30 AM–12:30 PM
Speaker 3: Juan Signes Codoñer, Professor of Greek, Complutense University of Madrid, "Palace Narratives as a Literary Category: Some Reflections"
About the Talk: There has recently been a lively discussion on genres in Byzantine historiography, and many categories have been established based on different criteria but focusing mainly on the text. Other factors, however, should be taken into account, such as the intended readership of many historical narratives and the places where they were produced. A special case is the historiographical production linked to the Imperial Palace at the time of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. Not only were the necessary sources compiled and systematized in the Imperial Palace (the so-called excerpta historica), but the persons (or rather, teams) who composed the “chronicles” of the time were working there collaboratively, and there is even a direct reference to the Palace library in Theophanes Continuatus III.43. The paper will explore to what extent the Palace as the place where works such as the Logothete group and Theophanes Continuatus were produced determined not only the narrative of these texts, but also their diffusion outside the palace and the forms it assumed.
About the Speaker: Juan Signes Codoñer is Professor of Greek at the Complutense University of Madrid and President of the Spanish Association of Byzantine Studies. He specializes in ancient and medieval Greek literature, Greek historiography, iconoclasm, Byzantine law, Greek grammatical tradition, classical tradition, and orality and writing in the Greek world. He holds a PhD in Classical Greek from the University of Salamanca, and previously served as a Professor at the University of Valladolid where he was coordinator of the international Master of Classical Cultures program with a network of twelve European universities. At the Complutense University of Madrid, he is additionally coordinator of the PhD program "Estudios del Mundo Antiguo".
Speaker 4: Anthony Kaldellis, Professor of Classics, University of Chicago, "Written by the Losers: Historiography in Enclosed Spaces"
About the Talk: A number of east Roman historical texts were written under conditions of confinement, such as imprisonment or home arrest. This lecture will survey the impact of these circumstances on the surviving record of political history and focus in particular on the work of Nikephoros Gregoras, whose tenor and character changed dramatically as the author lost the battle with Gregorios Palamas and was confined to home / monastic arrest.
About the Speaker: Anthony Kaldellis is a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has published many books and articles on the history, culture, and literature of Byzantium, ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. His most recent book is a new, comprehensive history of the eastern Roman empire: The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2023). He has translated many medieval Greek authors, especially historians such as Prokopios, Attaleiates, and Laonikos Chalkokondyles, and is also the host of the academic podcast “Byzantium & Friends,” still going strong since 2019.
12:30–1:15 PM Lunch
1:15–2:15 PM Speaker Roundtable and Q&A
About the Workshop
Following substantial investment in the area of Byzantine Studies at the University of Notre Dame, including the acquisition of the Milton V. Anastos Library of Byzantine Civilization and generous support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame has established an annual nine-month Postdoctoral Fellowship in Byzantine Studies. This fellowship is designed for junior scholars with a completed doctorate whose research deals with some aspect of the Byzantine world.
The intent of this Fellowship is to enable its holder to do innovative research drawing on the rich resources held in the Milton V. Anastos Collection, the Medieval Institute, and the Hesburgh Library more broadly. This may include the completion of book manuscripts and articles, work on text editions, or the development of new trajectories of research in one of the aforementioned fields.
Towards the conclusion of the fellowship period the fellow’s work will be at the center of a workshop organized within the framework of the Byzantine Studies Seminar. Senior scholars, chosen in cooperation with the Medieval Institute, will be invited for this event treating the fellow’s subject matter. The senior scholars will discuss draft versions of the fellow’s book manuscript or articles or discuss the further development of ongoing research projects.
Originally published at medieval.nd.edu.