Ian Colvin
Director of the Anglo-Georgian Excavations at Nokalakevi in the Republic of Georgia | Researcher at the University of Cambridge’s School Classics Project | University of Cambridge
Ian Colvin is a Byzantinist and Late Roman historian, specialising in the Eastern Frontier and the South Caucasus. He runs a long-standing excavation at Nokalakevi in the Republic of Georgia in partnership with the Georgian National Museum and the University of Winchester, and is a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Schools Classics Project. He is a consultant on the Rustaveli Foundation-funded project, the Kingdom of Egrisi-Lazika in the 1st to 8th cc AD.
Valentina Izmirlieva
Professor of Slavic Literature and Culture, Columbia University | Columbia University
Valentina Izmirlieva is a scholar of Balkan and Russian religious cultures with a strong background in critical theory, theology, and intellectual history. She holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Medieval Studies from the University of Chicago and has taught at Columbia University since 1999, where she currently heads the Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies. Much of Professor Izmirlieva’s research addresses cultural exchanges among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the context of multi-ethnic, multi-religious empires and their successor states. Her first monograph, All the Names of The Lord: Lists, Mysticism and Magic (University of Chicago, 2008), examines traces of the Kabbalah in Christian texts across medieval and early modern Europe. Her current book project focuses on Christian-Muslim cultural exchange in the Ottoman Empire through the lens of medieval Orthodox pilgrimages to Jerusalem and their transformation in modern times. She founded and leads Black Sea Networks, a global initiative to investigate the Black Sea as a hub of cultural, political, and historical interest.
Jane Kershaw
Associate Professor, School of Archaeology, University of Oxford
Jane Kershaw is Associate Professor in Archaeology at the University of Oxford and PI of the ERC project ‘Silver and the Origins of the Viking Age’. She researches and teaches the archaeology of early medieval Northern Europe, particularly the Scandinavian world of the Viking Age (750-1050 AD). Her work encompasses gender, artefact and wider historical themes, drawing extensively on the material culture record. Her most recent, project work investigates the sources of silver as a means of revealing when, where and why the Viking Age began. Publications include Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (2013), the edited volume (with Gareth Williams) Silver, Butter, Cloth: Monetary and Social Economies in the Viking Age (2019), with recent articles in the journals Antiquity and Journal of Archaeological Science.
Julia Matveyeva
formerly Associate Professor | O. M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy (Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Julia Matveyeva was an Associate Professor at the department of Fine Arts and Design of the O. M. Beketov National University of Urban Economy in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Her research has been primarily focused on Byzantine iconography, especially textiles and embroidery, within the Empire and in the neighboring territories, including Kievan Rus’, Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy. Her book Decorative Fabrics in the Mosaics of Ravenna: Semantics and Cultural Context was published in 2020 and she is now working on a new project titled The Evolution of the image of the altar space: from liturgical fabrics to iconostasis in the 4th- 15th centuries: Subjects, semantics, iconography.
Yulia Mikhailova
Associate Professor of History | New Mexico Tech
Yulia Mikhailova is an associate professor of History at New Mexico Tech. She has published the monograph Power, Property, and Authority in Rus and Latin Europe, ca 1000-1236 (2018) and is currently working on an English translation of the fourteenth-century Suzdalian Chronicle in co-authorship with Alexandra Vukovich of King’s College London. Her other recent and current projects include a comparative research of the religious-military rituals in Rus and high medieval Latin Europe and an investigation of the concepts of “heart” and “soul” in the twelfth-century East Slavonic political discourse.
Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz
Visiting Fellow in Maritime Archaeology | University of Southampton
Co-Director of the Offshore Archaeological Research Progamme (OAR) | Centre for Maritime Archaeology
Rodrigo Pacheco-Ruiz is a specialist in deep sea archaeology and underwater digital archaeological recording and the use of state-of-the-art robotics in archaeology. His main interest lies on the development of novel ways of exploring and recording our maritime cultural heritage. He was a member of the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project, where was in charge of the archaeological computing development and the digital documentation.
Currently, he is the Archaeological Data Manager for HMS Victory at The National Museum of The Royal Navy in Portsmouth UK, where he is in-charge of the archaeological documentation of HMS Victory’s Conservation Management Plan and the Victory Archives. This is a long-term project with the aim of restoring the only surviving example of a ship of the line to her appearance in 1805 using archaeology specific UAS robotic data, High-Resolution Laser Scan datasets and traditional shipbuilding techniques.
Pacheco-Ruiz has been working in archaeological research for more than 15 years, mainly on underwater exploration offshore and inshore. He is a member of the Centre for Maritime Archaeology (CMA) and National Oceanography Centre of the University of Southampton as well as co-investigator at the Mexico’s UNAM Maritime Archaeology programme and Associate Fellow of the Maritime Archaeology Research Institute (MARIS) of Södertorn University, Sweden.
Pacheco-Ruiz is an HSE Surface Supplied Commercial Diver a Civil Aviation Association Commercial drone pilot and a Nautical Archaeology Society tutor.
Olenka Pevny
Associate Professor of Early Slavonic and Ukrainian Studies | University of Cambridge
Olenka Pevny is Associate Professor of Early Slavonic and Ukrainian Studies and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. She is a cultural historian of medieval Kyivan Rus’ and early modern Ruthenian-Rus’ lands with an interest in the place of visual culture and of transcultural discourse in the shaping of premodern identities in Eastern Europe. Her research focuses on the reception and presentation of the Rus’ medieval past in different historical periods and various ethnic and political entities, including medieval Rus’, early modern Ukraine, the Cossack Hetmanate, the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and independent Ukraine. Currently, Dr Pevny is working on a book about Russian Imperial and Soviet cultural preservation and restoration policies on the territory of Ukraine. Prior to arriving in Cambridge, Dr Pevny was Associate Professor of Byzantine Studies at the University of Richmond and a curator of medieval art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.Biography coming soon…
Christian Raffensperger
Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities | Professor and Chair of History Director, Margaret Ermarth Institute for the Public Humanities | Wittenberg University
Christian Raffensperger is the Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities at Wittenberg University, as well as professor and chair of History. He has published several books dealing with the history of Kyivan Rus’ and medieval Eastern Europe, including Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World, 988–1146 (2012), Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus’ (2016), The Kingdom of Rus’ (2017), and Conflict, Bargaining, and Kinship Networks in Medieval Eastern Europe (2018). Raffensperger’s studies present the Rus’ state not as a principality or a collection of principalities but as one of the realms of medieval Europe.
Johan Rönnby
Professor of Archaeology, Maritime Archaeological Research Institute (MARIS) Södertörn University
Johan Rönnby is Professor of Archaeology and Director of the Maritime Archaeological Research Institute at Södertörn University. His research focuses on social and cultural interactions by humans with water — especially ships, but also lake dwellings, harbours and immersed and coastal landscapes. He has worked extensively on the Viking Age and on warships and maritime warfare. He is an investigative partner in the Black Sea MAP (Maritime Archaeological Project), which, in a survey of the Bulgarian waters of the Black Sea, has inspected and studied more than 60 shipwrecks, many of which provide the first views of ship types known from historical sources but never before seen. Publications include: Interpreting Shipwrecks: Maritime Archaeological Approaches (with Jonathan Adams et al.) (Southampton, 2013). His current research concerns humans’ past response to changing sea levels using an archeological long term perspective on different sites both in the Baltic and in the Black Sea.
Alexander Sarantis
Assistant Professor of Byzantine History | University of Warsaw
ULAM Research Fellow (sponsored by NAWA-Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange)
Alexander Sarantis is ULAM Research Fellow (sponsored by NAWA-Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange) and Assistant Professor of Byzantine History at the University of Warsaw. He previously held research fellowships at the University of Tübingen and the RGZM in Mainz, the latter an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (for experienced researchers), and lectured at the universities of Kent, Aberystwyth, and Swansea in the UK. His research focuses on warfare and its socio-economic impact, Byzantine-barbarian relations, migration, and cultural changes in eastern Roman borderland regions from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. He has published a monograph on Justinian’s Balkan Wars (2016), a co-edited two-volume collection on War and Warfare in Late Antiquity (2013), and numerous articles on barbarian groups along the Lower Danube frontier, and warfare and socio-economic changes in the Balkans.
Jonathan Shepard
Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford
Jonathan Shepard was University Lecturer in Russian History at Cambridge. With S. Franklin he co-authored The Emergence of Rus (1996) and co-edited Byzantine Diplomacy (1992), and twelve of his studies appear in his Emergent Elites and Byzantium (2011). Edited volumes include The Expansion of Orthodox Europe (2007), The Cambridge History of the Byzantine Empire (rev. ed. 2019); Byzantium and the Viking World (with F. Androshchuk and M. White, 2016); Imperial Spheres and the Adriatic (with M. Ančić and T. Vedriš, 2018); Viking-Age Trade: Silver, Slaves and Gotland (with J. Gruszczyński and M. Jankowiak, 2020); Political Culture in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, c. 700–c. 1500 (with C. Holmes, J. Van Steenbergen and B. Weiler, 2021); and Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age: In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan (ed. with L. Treadwell) (London, 2023 forthcoming).
Lilyana Yordanova
Research Fellow | École française d’Athènes
Lilyana Yordanova holds a PhD in Art History and Archeology of the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine world from the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Since 2020, she is a research fellow at the École française d’Athènes in Athens, Greece, where she is conducting a project about cross-cultural and interconfessional relations in the long 15th century based on the analysis of Christian and Muslim architecture and its impact on urban morphology in the Central Balkans. As of 2022, she also co-ordinates a five-year research program with Dr. Olivier Delouis (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Maison française d’Oxford) which aims to promote the study of the interim period of the 14th-16th century in South-Eastern Europe as an emerging field by reading across disciplinary divides as well as linguistic and ethnic limits. Yordanova’s latest article “Between Concepts and Realities: The Boyana Church as a “Mirror” of Its Patrons?” (Sofia, 2022) suggests a multifaceted reading of the donors’ images and inscriptions at Boyana from the standpoint of visual strategies, phrase structure and ideals of beauty inspired by Middle-Byzantine literature.