Split into a workshop and a museum visit, we hope that many of our colleagues will be able to attend and to participate in presenting their methodologies and sources on this theme. In particular, For the source-based discussion (workshop), planned for Friday afternoon, we would like to invite a small group of participants (ideally 3 to 5) to pre-circulate short (1-2 pages max) excerpts from written sources and/or images of material objects that relate to the theme of cultural brokerage and gatekeeping.

Please register at this link (https://forms.office.com/e/nKZmA8tmte), or via the QR code above if you are interested!

A more detailed schedule will be circulated in early September.

To foster scholarly discussion and exchange among members of the CoE and the wider international community, we plan to organize two sessions on behalf of the CoE at the International Medieval Congress 2026, University of Leeds (6–9 July 2026;

https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2026/).

The IMC is the largest scholarly gathering of its kind in Europe, and next year’s congress will focus on the thematic strand of “Temporalities” (while welcoming contributions beyond this theme).

Our two CoE sessions will be fully sponsored by the CoE and will address the topic “Imperial Legacies and Narratives of the Imperial Past.” They will explore the diversity of Eurasian imperial projects, examining how polities across Eurasia have engaged with their imperial pasts and with questions of legacy, authority, and legitimacy.

We invite contributions that examine the heritage of empires as expressed through texts, spatial practices, and material culture, from various regional, cultural, and linguistic contexts. The sessions aim to assess how insights from medieval Eurasia can broaden perspectives on the global Middle Ages.

If you are interested in participating, please send us a title and a short abstract (maximum 150 words) by 31 August 2025 at the latest.

We look forward to your proposals and to a stimulating discussion.

Francesca and Salvatore

With that said, as September gets under way, we're pleased to say that the JEARN Book Club will be continuing, with our next meeting taking place at the ÖAW on September 17th at 17:30!

For this session, we will be reading the anthology Emerging Powers in Eurasian Comparison 200-1100, edited by Professors Walter Pohl and Veronika Wieser. Happily, Professors Pohl and Wieser have very kindly agreed to join us, to kick off the discussion with a keynote, and give us some insight into the professional experience of putting together such a volume!

We hope to see you all there soon, with more details about the room location coming soon.

We'd like to you all to know that you are very welcome this Thursday 11th November at Apostelgasse 23 for a presentation by the President of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Sc.D.S. Demberel!

This will be taking place on Thursday from 16:00-17:00, and is organised by one of our members, Dr Francesca Fiaschetti, with Prof. Walter Pohl of the CoE also acting as Respondant. Please do attend if you are interested!

Fauvelle's work is a spirited, exciting read that is of broad interest to us as researchers in EurAsian studies, covering vast geographies and chronologies, while advocating for bold, constructive work with sources, in environments where they are often thin of the ground.

We hope that many of you can once again join us for a discussion of this fascinating monograph, and we welcome any guests from the fields of African Studies and African history who you may know or wish to invite! Furthermore, Professor Fauvelle will be presenting personally at the ÖAW in a lecture for the EurAsia Cluster, titled "Echoes in Stone. Refracting the Holy Sepulchre from Ethiopia to Scotia", so this session of the Book Club promises to be a useful corollary for any who will wish to end the following week!

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/en/imafo/the-institute/detail/echoes-in-stone

We are thrilled to announce that for the next session of the JEARN Book Club, we will be joined by Professor Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, to discuss his tireless work and publishing on EurAsian environmental history. We will be meeting at 17:30, on Thursday 4th December (04/12/25).

We will be reading Professor Preiser-Kapeller's recent co-edited volume with Adam Izdebski, A Companion to the History of Byzantium. Specifically, we will be reading and focusing on Professor Preiser-Kapeller and his co-editor's Introduction, and Chapters 12 & 15. These provide a specific case study and a general treatment of Byzantine Environmental History, indicative of Professor Preiser-Kapeller's work.

We hope to see many of you there, and we will be sharing details of the venue soon!

The JEARN Steering Committee is very happy to announce the next JEARN Workshop, which will be take place on 09. and 10. January 2026, at the University of Vienna's Apostelgasse site! 

Organised by Dr Flaminia Pischedda, the workshop will centre on the theme of 'The Materiality of Knowledge'. The workshop invites early-career researchers from the University of Vienna, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, CEU, and the University of Innsbruck to explore this theme by selecting either a short passage of text or an image of an artifact, accompanied by a short introduction and a set of research questions they wish to address. During the workshop, each participant will have up to 15 minutes to provide context for their chosen sources and to initiate discussion. The aim is to think through materials, to read them as much as to see them, to decipher the meanings embedded in their forms, and to stimulate perspectives which bring knowledge, in all its dimensions, into a new shape.

Please refer to the attached flyer for more information on the workshop, including a brief prospective bibliography for those interested! We invite all current and prospective members of JEARN who are interested in attending, as both presenters and participants, to register at the following link to a Microsoft Form, where prospective abstracts should also be submitted:

CfP - JEARN Workshop 3 - The Materiality of Knowledge – Formular ausfüllen

If you have any further questions, please contact Dr Flaminia Pischedda (flaminia.pischedda@univie.ac.at). Please feel free to share this Call for Papers, including the link and QR code to the registration form, with any colleagues or students who might be interested.

We hope to see many of you there, and we are particularly excited at the prospect of being joined by some of our colleagues from the University of Innsbruck, who will be in Vienna for another Cluster event!

We are pleased to announce our first session of the new year, on Thursday 22. January @ 17:30-19:00, in the ÖAW Site at Georg-Coch Platz! We will be meeting in Besprechungsräume 1 & 2, and we are very happy to be joined by the University of Vienna's Professor Naoíse Mac Sweeney, whose 2023 popular historical publication, The West - A New History in Fourteen Lives, will be our topic of discussion for the evening.

We hope to see many of you there!

Having hit the ground running, the JEARN is excited to keep up the momentum, and we are issuing a Call for Papers for our 4th Workshop, scheduled for March 13-14 at the ÖAW campus! Led this time by our colleauge Dr Dominik Haas, the theme is 'Working with Texts", and we will be exploring our shared problematic of working with textual evidence under imperfect conditions. Rather than focusing on specific objects, periods, or results, the workshop will foreground methods, practices, and problems of text-based scholarship in a broad sense. Contributors are invited to reflect on the concrete conditions of their research:

• What does "philology" or "textual criticism" mean in their discipline?

• What counts as a text, a source, or an edition?

• Which challenges are central – fragmentary corpora, translation layers, manuscript variance, theoretical constraints, or uneven access to resources – and how are these addressed in practice?

• What do scholars aim to achieve through their work, and how are these aims secured

through concrete methodological choices?

Please see the attached flyer for more information, and links to the registration and abstract-submission form, which can also be found below! We encourage everyone to distribute this call to whomever may be interested, and please do not hesitate to reach out to our organisers Dr Dominik Haas and Calahan Morse if you have any questison! We hope to see many of our colleagues there, both old and new.

Registration Link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/FkhDcxYzjY