CSMC Newsletter

Only a couple of weeks to go until our major conference ‘Studying Written Artefacts: Challenges and Perspectives’, from 27-29 September! Structured in three parallel sessions, this conference will provide a unique forum for sharing experiences and views among the international community working on written artefacts, showcasing pioneering research, and developing new ideas. The preliminary schedule of the event is now available on the conference’s website, so do have a look at schedule and sign up either for the whole conference or for individual days.

We are happy to announce the winners of the J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award 2023: For their excellent contributions, the award goes to Elif Sezer (FU Berlin) for her dissertaion on A Manuscript Community in Ottoman Istanbul (18th-19th Centuries): Heroic Stories, Social Profiles, and Reading Space, and Daria Kohler (Kondakova) (KU Leuven) for her dissertation on ‘Publication’, papyri, and literary texts: process and presentation, respectively. The J.P. Gumbert Dissertation Award honours the best doctoral thesis or theses defended in each year contributing to any aspect of the study of manuscripts and other written artefacts. It includes a prize money of 5,000 Euro and a fellowship for a research stay at CSMC.

The new volume of the series Studies in Manuscript Cultures is out now. Tied and Bound: A Comparative View on Manuscript Binding, edited by Alessandro Bausi and Michael Friedrich, presents a series of case studies on devices and strategies adopted to achieve cohesion of written artefacts, particularly manuscripts, by cultures distant in space (from China to West Africa) and time (from the third millennium BCE to the present). This comparative view provides the frame for understanding a phenomenon of essential importance for the study of the structure of written artefacts. The volume is open access and will soon also be available for download from the publisher's website and the CSMC website.

This August, we welcome Nicole Brisch as new Professor of Assyriology at CSMC. Joining us from the University of Copenhagen, she is an expert of ancient Mesopotamian literature, especially written in Sumerian, as well as religious and economic history. Her most recent book, co-edited with Fumi Karahashi (Japan), includes a range of articles by junior and senior scholars revolving around the topic of women and religion in the ancient Near East and Asia. She currently works on the religious rituals and their archival documentation.

We are also delighted that seven new PhD researchers have become part of the Centre this month. Vivian Berto de Castro (Art History), Stefano Farinella (History of Science), Aikaterini Grigoriadou (Classics and Archeometry), Michael Hensley (Ethiopian Studies), Nilofaar Homayoonzad (Iranian Studies), Jannis Kostelnik (African Studies), and Malgorzata Grzelec (Archaeometry), our first joint PhD student with DESY, will further diversify our research portfolio with their dissertation projects. 

This July, twelve students from grades 8 to 10 got to know the VR reconstruction of the historical theatre of Miletus, which has been developed within the CSMC project ‘Immersive City Scripts: Inscriptions and the Construction of Social Spaces in Miletus (Asia Minor)’, as part of the programme of the St. Peter-Ordingen JuniorAkademie. The youth academies offer an extensive holiday programme to particularly interested students, giving them insights into different areas of science and the arts. The course took place at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory of Universität Hamburg.

At this year’s edition of the TAG conference, 20 speakers from 14 countries from five continents gathered in Hamburg to discuss a cultural phenomenon whose significance scholars have only just started to appreciate: ‘tagging’, writing one's name in public space. The TAG conference is the most important international conference on this topic and brings researchers together with ‘writers’ from the scene every year. After editions in Berlin, Amsterdam, Cologne, and Modena, the conference came to Hamburg this year in cooperation with UWA as part of the exhibition 'EINE STADT WIRD BUNT' at Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte.