Where is the Late Antique Encounters Conference being held?

The conference is scheduled to take place in Ghent, BEL.

What is the primary focus of the LAEC 2027 event?

The conference focuses on the multifaceted interactions and transformations that characterized the Late Antique period, exploring various encounters between cultures, religions, and political entities.

When does the Late Antique Encounters Conference take place?

The conference is scheduled to run for several days in February.

Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027)

Name: Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027)
Start: 2027-02-03T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-02-05T00:00:00Z
Location: Ghent

Feb 3–5, 2027Ghent, BelgiumIn-person

Registration open

The Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027) is an academic gathering focused on the multifaceted interactions and transformations that characterized the Late Antique period. Hosted in Ghent, BEL, this conference provides a platform for scholars to delve into the complex dynamics of this pivotal era, examining how various cultures, religions, and political entities converged and diverged. The event aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue, bringing together diverse perspectives to illuminate the intricate web of encounters that shaped the late antique world. Participants will explore themes ranging from cultural exchange and religious syncretism to political negotiations and social shifts, contributing to a deeper understanding of this transformative historical period.

Committees & topics

Topics
Late Antiquity: Transformation of the Roman World · Papyrology: Documentary Worlds of the Ancient Mediterranean · Prosopography: Reconstructing Late Antique Lives and Networks · Numismatics: Coinage of the Late Roman and Early Medieval World · Narratology: Storytelling in Late Antique Texts · Linguistics: Languages and Contact in Late Antiquity · Art History: Visual Culture of Late Antiquity · Archaeology: Excavating the Late Antique World

Why it matters

Understanding the Late Antique period is crucial for comprehending the foundational elements of subsequent historical developments in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. This era, often characterized by significant societal upheaval and redefinition, saw the decline of classical empires and the rise of new religious and political structures. The encounters of this period, whether through conflict, trade, or intellectual exchange, laid the groundwork for the medieval world and beyond.

The conference's focus on "encounters" highlights the interconnectedness of regions and peoples during this time, challenging simplistic narratives of decline and emphasizing the dynamic processes of adaptation and innovation. By examining these interactions, scholars can draw parallels to contemporary global challenges, such as cultural integration, religious pluralism, and geopolitical shifts. The insights gained from studying late antique encounters can inform our understanding of how societies navigate periods of profound change and how diverse groups interact and shape shared futures.

Furthermore, the interdisciplinary nature of the conference encourages a holistic approach to historical inquiry. By integrating insights from archaeology, history, art history, religious studies, and philology, participants can construct a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of the past. This collaborative methodology is essential for addressing complex historical questions and for developing robust interpretations of the evidence available.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of the Late Antique Encounters Conference, a robust understanding of historical methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches is paramount. Participants should consider how different forms of evidence – archaeological, textual, and artistic – can be integrated to reconstruct the complex interactions of the period. This involves not only analyzing individual pieces of evidence but also understanding their broader context and potential biases.

Delegates should also prepare to engage in critical discussions regarding the interpretation of "encounter" itself. This concept can encompass a wide range of interactions, from violent conflict and conquest to peaceful trade and intellectual exchange. Understanding the nuances of these different forms of encounter, and their varying impacts on societies, is key to contributing meaningfully to the conference discourse. Consider the frameworks outlined in the "Engagement Strategies" lesson to analyze how different groups interacted.

Finally, given the conference's location in Ghent, BEL, participants might reflect on the historical connections between Western Europe and the broader late antique world. While the conference focuses on a distant past, the location itself offers a contemporary context for discussions on cultural heritage and historical memory. Engaging with the "Hidden Stakeholders" lesson can help in identifying the various groups whose perspectives shaped and were shaped by these historical encounters, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the period's complexities.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Belgium

Host nation for the conference, providing a European academic setting for discussions on the Late Antique period.

Role in topic

As the host country, BEL provides the logistical and academic infrastructure for the conference, facilitating international scholarly exchange on the Late Antique period. While not a direct geographical focus of the Late Antique period itself, its academic institutions contribute significantly to historical research and dialogue.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Late Antiquity: Transformation of the Roman World

Late Antiquity, conventionally bracketed between the crisis of the third century and the rise of Islam in the seventh, designates the period in which the unified Roman Mediterranean gave way to a constellation of successor societies: the Christianized Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, the Sasanian Persian realm, the post-Roman kingdoms of western Europe, and eventually the early Caliphates. Older narratives of catastrophic 'decline and fall', popularized by Edward Gibbon, have been substantially revised since Peter Brown's 1971 'The World of Late Antiquity', which reframed the era as one of religious, cultural, and administrative transformation rather than simple collapse. Key processes include the Christianization of Roman society under Constantine and his successors, the codification of law under Theodosius II and Justinian, the settlement of Gothic, Vandal, Frankish, and Lombard groups within former Roman provinces, and the prolonged Roman–Sasanian rivalry that culminated in the exhausting wars of the early seventh century. The Arab conquests of the 630s–640s redrew the political map of the Near East and North Africa and are now commonly treated as part of, rather than after, Late Antiquity. Contemporary scholarship debates the period's chronological boundaries, the balance between continuity and rupture, the role of climate and pandemic disease (notably the Justinianic Plague), and the degree to which 'Late Antiquity' is a useful category outside the Mediterranean and Near East. Comparative work increasingly integrates Armenia, the Caucasus, Arabia, Aksum, and the Iranian world into the field.

Key players

Papyrology: Documentary Worlds of the Ancient Mediterranean

Papyrology is the study of texts written on papyrus, parchment, and related materials recovered primarily from the dry sands of Egypt, with significant finds also from Herculaneum, the Judaean Desert, and Petra. The discipline took shape in the late nineteenth century with large-scale excavations at Oxyrhynchus by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, whose finds continue to be edited today. Papyri preserve an extraordinary range of material: literary fragments of lost works, private letters, tax receipts, contracts, petitions, school exercises, and Christian and Manichaean scriptures. For Late Antiquity, papyri are an indispensable window onto everyday administration, social relations, and religious change in Roman and Byzantine Egypt, complementing the more formal evidence of law codes and chronicles. Bilingual Greek–Coptic and later Greek–Arabic dossiers, such as the Aphrodito archive of Dioscorus and the early Islamic Aphrodito papyri of Qurra ibn Sharik, illuminate the transition from Byzantine to Umayyad rule. Current debates concern the ethics of provenance and the antiquities market, the application of multispectral imaging and AI to unread Herculaneum scrolls (the Vesuvius Challenge), open digital editions such as papyri.info, and the integration of papyrological data with archaeological and prosopographical research.

Key players

Prosopography: Reconstructing Late Antique Lives and Networks

Prosopography is the collective study of individuals attested in historical sources, reconstructing careers, family ties, and social networks in order to illuminate the structures of past societies. For the late antique world, the foundational works are the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE), edited by A.H.M. Jones, J.R. Martindale, and J. Morris, covering roughly 260–641, and the Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, which catalogues ecclesiastical figures region by region. These reference works draw together inscriptions, papyri, legal texts, chronicles, hagiography, and letters to map the senatorial aristocracy, imperial bureaucracy, military commanders, bishops, monks, and provincial elites whose interactions shaped the period. More recent projects extend the method to the Byzantine world (Prosopography of the Byzantine World), the early Islamic elite, and Syriac and Coptic milieus. Digital prosopography has transformed the field, enabling network analysis, linked open data integration with gazetteers such as Pleiades, and cross-referencing with epigraphic and papyrological databases. Methodological debates concern how to handle homonymy and uncertain identifications, the underrepresentation of women, slaves, and non-elites, and the risks of treating fragmentary evidence as if it yielded continuous biographies.

Key players

Numismatics: Coinage of the Late Roman and Early Medieval World

Numismatics studies coins as economic instruments, political messages, and archaeological artifacts. For Late Antiquity, the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine restructured the Roman monetary system around the gold solidus, which retained remarkable stability for centuries and became a Mediterranean-wide reserve currency. Mint marks, imperial portraits, and reverse iconography document the movements of emperors, the proclamation of victories, and the gradual Christianization of state imagery, including the appearance of the chi-rho and, under Justinian II, the bust of Christ. Coinage is equally central for the successor states: Vandal, Ostrogothic, Visigothic, Frankish, and Lombard rulers struck coins that often imitated imperial models while asserting local authority, and Sasanian silver drachms circulated widely across Eurasia. The early Islamic monetary reforms of Abd al-Malik in the 690s, replacing figural Byzantine and Sasanian designs with epigraphic coinage, mark a decisive moment in late antique visual and economic culture. Contemporary numismatics combines die studies, hoard analysis, metallurgical testing, and large digital corpora to address questions of monetization, fiscal policy, trade routes, and the chronology of political change. The illicit trade in coins and the dispersal of hoards without context remain pressing ethical concerns.

Key players

Narratology: Storytelling in Late Antique Texts

Narratology, developed in the twentieth century by theorists such as Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal, and Seymour Chatman, analyzes how narratives are structured: voice, focalization, time, plot, and the relationship between story and discourse. Applied to late antique literature, narratological tools illuminate a remarkably diverse corpus, including ecclesiastical histories (Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen), classicizing histories (Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius), hagiography and saints' lives, monastic apophthegmata, novelistic apocrypha, and Syriac and Coptic homilies. Late antique authors inherited classical rhetorical training while writing for new audiences shaped by Christian liturgy, ascetic ideals, and imperial ceremony. Genres blended: martyr acts borrowed novelistic techniques, chronicles embedded miracle narratives, and biblical exegesis became a vehicle for ethical storytelling. Procopius' juxtaposition of his official Wars with the scandalous Secret History exemplifies the period's self-conscious manipulation of narrative authority. Current scholarship asks how late antique narrators construct truth claims, manage multiple religious audiences, and negotiate the legacy of Greco-Roman paideia. Comparative narratology brings Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Middle Persian, and early Arabic traditions into dialogue, while digital tools enable corpus-level study of narrative patterns.

Key players

Linguistics: Languages and Contact in Late Antiquity

Late Antiquity was a profoundly multilingual world. Greek and Latin remained the principal languages of imperial administration, but the period also saw the flourishing of Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ge'ez, Middle Persian (Pahlavi), and the codification of biblical and liturgical traditions in each. The gradual emergence of the Romance vernaculars from spoken Latin, the spread of Greek as a lingua franca in the eastern provinces, and the rise of Arabic as an imperial and scholarly language by the seventh and eighth centuries are central linguistic developments. Linguists working on Late Antiquity examine phonological and morphological change, language contact and borrowing, bilingual code-switching attested in papyri and inscriptions, and the creation of new scripts (Armenian, Georgian, Gothic, and later Arabic adaptations). Translation movements — Greek into Syriac, Syriac and Greek into Arabic, Latin into Gothic — were engines of religious and intellectual exchange. The biblical translations of Jerome (the Vulgate), Ulfilas, and the Syriac Peshitta exemplify the period's translational creativity. Current research draws on digital corpora, sociolinguistic models, and computational methods to study register, diglossia, and the social distribution of literacy, while ongoing debates concern the timing of the Latin-to-Romance transition and the dynamics of Arabization.

Key players

Art History: Visual Culture of Late Antiquity

Late antique art history examines the visual transformation of the Mediterranean and Near East between roughly the third and seventh centuries, encompassing monumental architecture, mosaic, sculpture, ivory, silver, manuscript illumination, and small portable objects. Alois Riegl's 'Late Roman Art Industry' (1901) was a pivotal intervention, arguing that the period's stylistic shifts represented a coherent new Kunstwollen rather than decadence. Subsequent scholarship, including the landmark 1977–78 'Age of Spirituality' exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, consolidated Late Antiquity as a major field of art-historical inquiry. Key monuments include the tetrarchic palaces of Split and Thessaloniki, the basilicas of Rome and Ravenna, the imperial mosaics of San Vitale, Hagia Sophia under Justinian, the desert monasteries of Egypt and Palestine, the synagogues of Galilee and Dura-Europos, and Sasanian rock reliefs and stuccoes. Christian iconography developed alongside continuing pagan, Jewish, and Manichaean traditions, while early Islamic art emerged from this shared visual vocabulary at sites such as the Dome of the Rock and Qusayr Amra. Current debates address the agency of patrons and craftsmen, the mobility of artistic forms across confessional and political boundaries, the use of spolia, and the digital reconstruction of damaged or destroyed monuments, including those affected by recent conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

Key players

Archaeology: Excavating the Late Antique World

The archaeology of Late Antiquity has matured into a distinct subfield over the past half-century, displacing older assumptions that the post-classical centuries were materially impoverished. Survey archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean, beginning with Georges Tchalenko's work in the Syrian limestone massif and continuing through projects in the Negev, Cyrenaica, and Anatolia, has revealed dense rural settlement and economic vitality well into the sixth and seventh centuries. Urban excavations at sites such as Aphrodisias, Ephesus, Caesarea Maritima, Sardis, and Jerash document the gradual reorganization rather than abrupt abandonment of classical cities. Ceramic studies, especially of African Red Slip ware and Late Roman amphorae, have allowed archaeologists to map long-distance trade networks with new precision, while bioarchaeology, isotope analysis, and ancient DNA have transformed understanding of mobility, diet, and disease, including the Justinianic Plague. Excavations of churches, synagogues, monasteries, and mosques illuminate religious change, and frontier studies on the Danube, in northern Mesopotamia, and along the Arabian limes reframe the relationship between Roman, Sasanian, and Arab polities. The field faces serious challenges: armed conflict and looting in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen; climate-driven site loss; and debates over the repatriation of objects and the ethics of fieldwork. Digital recording, remote sensing, and open data are increasingly central to responsible practice.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rory McIlroy Eyes Historic Third Masters Win

Trump and Xi's BIT Talks

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India Bans Bilateral Sports with Pakistan

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Belgium February 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027)

Feb 3–5, 2027Ghent, BelgiumIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Late Antiquity: Transformation of the Roman World · Papyrology: Documentary Worlds of the Ancient Mediterranean · Prosopography: Reconstructing Late Antique Lives and Networks · Numismatics: Coinage of the Late Roman and Early Medieval World · Narratology: Storytelling in Late Antique Texts · Linguistics: Languages and Contact in Late Antiquity · Art History: Visual Culture of Late Antiquity · Archaeology: Excavating the Late Antique World

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Belgium

Host nation for the conference, providing a European academic setting for discussions on the Late Antique period.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Late Antiquity: Transformation of the Roman World

Key players

Papyrology: Documentary Worlds of the Ancient Mediterranean

Key players

Prosopography: Reconstructing Late Antique Lives and Networks

Key players

Numismatics: Coinage of the Late Roman and Early Medieval World

Key players

Narratology: Storytelling in Late Antique Texts

Key players

Linguistics: Languages and Contact in Late Antiquity

Key players

Art History: Visual Culture of Late Antiquity

Key players

Archaeology: Excavating the Late Antique World

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Late Antique Encounters Conference (LAEC 2027).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

Rory McIlroy Eyes Historic Third Masters Win

Trump and Xi's BIT Talks

Spain's NATO Tensions with Washington

India Bans Bilateral Sports with Pakistan

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Belgium February 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

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Frequently asked questions