CALL. 28.02.2019: [SESSION 2] The Book of Judith and Empire (EABS 2019) - Warsaw (Poland)
FECHA LÍMITE/DEADLINE/SCADENZA: 28/02/2019
FECHA CONGRESO/CONGRESS DATE/DATA CONGRESSO: 11-12-13-14/08/2019
LUGAR/LOCATION/LUOGO: University of Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland)
ORGANIZADOR/ORGANIZER/ORGANIZZATORE: Benedikt Eckhardt (University of Edinburgh); Sylvie Honigman (Tel Aviv University).
INFO: call - B.Eckhardt@ed.ac.uk - honigman@post.tau.ac.il
CALL:
The Research Group is primarily concerned with the impact of empire on the political organization, social structures, and ideology of local polities of the Ancient Near East in Hellenistic times, on the one hand, and their literary imagination, on the other. The structural changes and historical events affecting Judaea will be both addressed directly and set in their wider, regional and interregional context(s), primarily (but not exclusively) defined as the Seleukid empire at large and Ptolemaic Egypt. Likewise, the question of the relation between, on the one hand, the Hellenistic, imperial setting and its bearings on Judaea and neighbouring polities and, on the other hand, the literary production of the time, will be of central concern. To this end, the Research group intends to bring together historians, social scientists, epigraphists, archaeologists, and text scholars. Although the Research Group will focus on Hellenistic times, its chronological range will also cover Persian and Roman imperial times, and cooperation with Research Groups focusing on these periods as well as on narrowly-defined topics (such as “resistance”) overlapping with the concerns of the Research Group will be considered.
In the EABS Conference of 2019 the Impact of Hellenistic Empires Research Unit will hold a session on the theme of ‘The Book of Judith and Empire’. This topic is understood in a broad way, and all perspectives may be considered. However, we are particularly interested in contributions that highlight the book’s take on imperial rule in view of its (likely) Hellenistic background. What constitutes empire for the author of Judith? What are the possible responses to it? And how does the book compare to other historiographical attempts of the period to make sense of empire?
The session with be chaired by Benedikt Eckhardt. The panelists will include Mette Bundvad, Sylvie Honigman, Thomas Kruger, and Christophe Nihan with Paul J. Kosmin as a respondent.