Reflections on the International Congress of Byzantine Studies 2026

[Jubal]

A few short notes on the ICBS 2026, which was a month ago here in Vienna. For those unfamiliar, the ICBS is a rotating, once per five years conference, this was its 25th iteration.

Overall thoughts

Overall I'm glad I went. It was a really interesting, exceptionally packed week. I went to a lot of talks, by no means every session but I got to most of the sessions on most of the days which is plenty enough for anyone.

The Caucasus was really well represented, and I mostly went to Caucasus papers for the whole week with strong Georgian and Armenian contingents. In both cases, art history and especially building archaeology were somewhat dominant topics, and then manuscript studies as a close second which makes sense considering these are the topics that most overlap with physical heritage preservation but it would be good to try and get more work that broadens out into thinking about wider historiographical issues in future.

There were a couple of quirks with the event organisation: reducing to one paper per presenter as is done in the Leeds IMC would be sensible, and the day structure had some odd elements like the breakfast baked goods not appearing until the second break by which time I was past "need food" and into "not really able to focus".

These are pretty minor things though, and in general the organisation was a triumph. The committee should be justly proud of running an event that large without major hitches, and the add-ons were well picked, I managed to make use of my free ticket to the Vienna papyrus museum which had some great stuff in that I'd not seen before.

Concerns about the future

My bigger concerns and things I'd lose more sleep over were about where we are and where we're going as a field. We is of course an odd term here: I have Masters-level training in Byzantine history, but I'm really a Caucasiologist and DH specialist. That said, I am now on the AIEB's Commission for Prosopography, so I guess if I'm a Byzantinist enough for that I can have some opinions.

I have three major concerns in terms of discussions not being had: one is around precarity and education, one is around digital work and especially AI, and the third is around public engagement with the field. Whilst all of these had some presence at the ICBS, and many of the organisers in particular did say all the right things on the precarity issue, they did all feel very much like sidelines for an event that is intended to shape the future of the field. Can we do that, if our internal discussions are out of sync with the external forces acting upon us?

Regarding precarity: there were good words said decrying the problems of junior academic precarity, but railing against it sadly doesn't do a lot. We need to think more about how we obtain public support for better public funding of our field, and also how we safeguard against losses of institutional knowledge in harsh funding environments. We need to do better at pooling educational resources to help retain skills, and at engaging interested people outside academia to expand that skill base further beyond the professional academic community. Those are the discussions I felt were somewhat lacking here.

On the topic of Digital Humanities, there were some but not a lot of DH papers in general, and I think many of those were focused on particular database approaches so the Congress may have missed some opportunities to try and engage everyone else with the ways that digital work is changing the field: I worry about the extent to which digital Byzantinists may get cut off from the rest of our colleagues. Most problematically there was one session in the entire congress about LLM/AI technologies, which was solely focused on exploratory DH methods using these systems (which is to say it was mostly a list of "we tried to do this, here's the data showing how much it isn't working yet"). It seems to me that this misses enormous aspects of the potential effects of these technologies on both education and public interest in the topic.

That brings us onto said public interest issues. I think mine was the only talk which touched on modern far-right use of Byzantium and Byzantine imagery, which is sadly an increasingly significant element in modern reception of Byzantium. Byzantine Studies as a field still seems to consistently think of the reception of Byzantium as centred on a sort of orientalising, Edward Gibbon descendant idea that the Byzantines were in some way not really Romans, and that emphasising the Roman nature of Byzantium is important to rescue the historical Byzantines from that. The trouble is that the idea of a proto-fascistic violent Roman state as a historical model people want to emulate (which, in a very good plenary talk, Rebecca Darley dubbed 'revenant Romanitas') can, rather than being challenged by the complexity of Byzantine history, actually then be directly drafted into Byzantium which creates a more explicitly Christian model for the modern far-right activist aspiring to a Christofascist republic. I think a lot of Byzantinists, especially younger ones, are aware of this line of thinking, but we still collectively lack structures and spaces for tackling it.

That's the sharpest end of our public reception problems, but other changes are absolutely happening, especially as regards things like games creating a new wave of Byzantine reception. In Turkey, historical dramas are also producing new forms of reception of the period, and online spaces in general are changing who finds out about the Empire and why. One thing I would like to see from the AIEB in the next five-year period would be a move towards having a Commission for the Public Understanding of Byzantium, which feels like one of the largest elements lacking from its current set of commissions.

The Good News

There were some big positives too. Especial congratulations should go to Claudia Rapp who is now president of the AIEB and who, besides being the first woman to hold that role, is a powerfully competent organiser whose skills I have no doubt the Association will benefit greatly from. In general the AIEB is big enough that its institutional stability isn't at any risk, it's continued to grow as of this Congress, and the effective engagement with Austrian politicians around the Congress should be good for the field's future too (it's hard to imagine a relevant government minister actually coming to a conference session of a 2000 person history conference in the UK, but I guess Austria is a rather smaller country. It was still a nice touch that it happened here.)

The presence of new commissions for Digital Humanities and Prosopography will hopefully also help the development of DH work in the field in the coming years, and I look forward to joining the Prosopography commission going forwards. I think there's a lot of work to be done here, and in some cases I suspect the commissions will largely be formalising already ongoing work. I am often nervous of the tendencies of these sorts of bodies to attempt to push for standards proliferation rather than trying to take a more practical approach, but in these cases I am very hopeful that they have the right mix of people available to become productive.

It was also nice to be able to get a lot of Caucasiologists together - over 25 of us at the Medieval Caucasus Network meeting, which is a lot for a small field. It's tricky bridging international gaps for this sort of work, but the AIEB provided a really nice space through which to do so and I think we managed some things we can build on well in future. I did a short writeup of that for the Medieval Caucasus Network website, which can be found here.

Final thoughts

So overall assessment: some big challenges facing the field, some positives and some great people doing great work, but also some conversations that need to be had for dealing with them. I think steps are best being taken on the digital side, though there one of the largest challenges is going to be connecting that up with the rest of the field. Thinking about Byzantine studies as a larger endeavour than the ruminations of academics to one another is difficult in a field that has built itself on the understanding that Byzantium is almost defined by its long-term treatment as a historical backwater, but that's a challenge we have to face too.

I really do think Byzantium and its reception matter: much more so than thirty years ago, Byzantine history is getting picked up and used, often in ways that are quite opposed to how we as scholars would want those topics to be handled. It's an important part of understanding the premodern world in general, and some of the things that otherwise don't make sense about the medieval world click into place much better when Byzantium and its neighbours are given their appropriate roles. As such, I really hope we do deal with the issues facing us: there's a lot of interest and complexity to be found, and the more we can develop a collective, inclusive understanding of what those past worlds were like, and the more we can explain that to people, the better the legacy of the Byzantines in all their own complexity can be retained and considered.