September 2013

9/19- 9/20

Biblical Studies, West and East: Trends, Challenges and Prospects
International conference hosted by the Department of Theology of the Ukrainian Catholic University. 
Keynote Speakers: EMMANUEL TOV, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; REINHARD NEUDECKER SJ, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome; JANUSZ CZERSKI, University of Opole, Poland; PETER DUBOVSKY, Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome; PAOLO GARUTI, Angelicum, Rome / Ecole biblique, Jerusalem. 
More information 

9/26- 9-28

Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives (2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium)
The 2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium, “Forbidden Texts on the Western Frontier: The Christian Apocrypha in North American Perspectives,” will take place at York University September 26–28, 2013. The event is organized by Tony Burke (York University) in consultation with Brent Landau (University of Oklahoma). It brings together 22 Canadian and U.S. scholars to share their work and discuss present and future collaborative projects.
The symposium is open to scholars, students, and interested members of the public; all may register for the event and take part in discussions. One of the goals of the symposium is to make the work of North American scholars on the Christian Apocrypha more widely known, not only to scholars in cognate disciplines (such as New Testament Studies or Medieval Studies) but also to students, who will be the future scholars in the discipline, as well as to the wider public who is interested in the texts but has been ill-informed about them through films, novels, and fringe scholarship.
For additional information on the 2013 Symposium contact: tburke@yorku.ca or bclandau@gmail.com
More information

9/30

Call for Papers
The Leonardo Museum in downtown Salt Lake City has been chosen to host a major exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls entitled, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Life and Faith in Biblical Times,” November 22, 2013 — April 27, 2014.

In connection with the conclusion of the exhibit, the museum is hosting an academic conference, “The Prophetic Voice at Qumran and Contemporary Communities.” 

The conference is co-sponsored by the Religious Studies Center and the Evans Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. We plan to publish the conference proceedings.
We are pleased to announce a call for paper or presentation proposals that address the theme expressed in the conference title. Topics may include the nature of prophecy at Qumran, the interpretation of prophecy at Qumran, the identification and status of Jewish prophets at that time, the authoritative prophetic voice at Qumran compared to contemporary communities or groups, text-critical issues regarding prophetic texts, and so forth.

Proposals for papers and presentations may be submitted until September 30 to Professor Dana M. Pike at BYU’s Religious Studies Center at the following email address: rsc@byu.edu (please put DSS Conference in the subject line)

October 2013

10/4- 10/6

Pilgrims’ Progress: Pilgrimage across Time and Cultures 
The Institute of Pilgrimage Studies in conjunction with the International Consortium for Pilgrimage Studies invites abstracts for the 2nd annual Symposium to be held at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. The conference will embrace thematic sessions including:Artistic and Literary Responses to Pilgrimage,Health and Pilgrimage,Material Culture of Pilgrimage,Pilgrimage in the Eastern Mediterranean,Pilgrimage in the Ancient World,Personal Reflections on Pilgrimage,Space, Place and Lived Experience of Pilgrimage. More information

10/9- 10/12

Changing Perspectives in Old Testament Studies: Past, Present, and Future 
An International Conference at the University of Copenhagen. The conference focuses on the major changes within the field of Old Testament Studies during the past 50 years. It is the aim of the conference to investigate those changing perspectives within a broader context of Hellenistic studies, theories of composition, theories of history, anthropology, archaeology, Ancient Near Eastern religion and comparative literature, Dead Sea texts and cultural memory studies, and to suggest future prospects for the discipline.More information

10/15

Application Deadline-CFP 
The University of Southern California's West Semitic Research Project (http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp) has finished training the third round of applicants for training in Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and is looking for another round of applicants.
USC'S TRAINING Program is for scholars, conservators, library and museum professionals, archivists and researchers. Participants are trained in the use of Reflectance Transformation imaging (RTI) for documenting ancient texts and artifacts, including the loan of imaging equipment.The objective of this project is to develop an infrastructure for training scholars in the use of RTI technology and subsequently to lend the necessary imaging equipment to participants in the training program so they can do an initial RTI documentation project either in field environments (archaeological sites, etc.) or in libraries, museums and/or other similar venues, worldwide (for examples of RTI images see this video. 
This initial undertaking should be understood to be a pilot project that can develop into an ongoing, broader documentary effort and preferably may also serve as the catalyst for establishing a scholarly network consortium for image documentation of a given corpus (or corpora) of ancient texts and/or artifacts. All equipment to be lent out is both rugged and compact and is thus ideal for doing sophisticated imaging in remote locations. Twenty awards over three years (approximately seven per year) for traineeships will be provided based on the merit and intrinsic importance of a proposed pilot imaging project as well as the appropriateness of the subject matter for RTI imaging. 
More information or see http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/projects/imls.shtml, or contact Marilyn Lundberg (mlundber@usc.edu) or Bruce Zuckerman (bzuckerm@usc.edu).

10/23-10/26

Westar Institute Fall Meeting 
The biannual meeting of the Westar Institute, advancing religious literacy through a twofold mission of fostering collaborative research in religious studies and communicating the results of scholarship to a broad non-specialist public, will take place this Fall in Santa Rosa, California. Critical questions to be considered include:

• Did Christianity begin with Jesus, Paul, Luke, or Constantine?
• Which came first, the Gospel of John or the Gospel of Luke?
• What did the first New Testament look like?
• How did the debate about rules and rituals shape Christianity?
• Does the date of Christian origins impact Jewish-Christian relations?

Please inquire about student discounts at westar@westarinstitute.org. Program details and registration now available at: http://www.westarinstitute.org/national-meetings/westar-fall-meeting-2013/

November 2013

11/20- 11/22

John, Jesus, and History: Engaging the Legacies of C.H. Dodd and Raymond E. Brown 
The occasion of this pre-SBL conference at St. Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore is the 50th and 60th anniversaries of Dodd’s books on John and history as well as the ongoing significance of Brown, who taught at St. Mary’s from 1959 to 1971. The conference is sponsored by St. Mary’s and the SBL’s John, Jesus, and History section. The keynote address will be given by Jimmy Dunn. Papers and other presentations will be given by John Ashton, Alan Culpepper, Jonathan Draper, Craig Koester, Wendy E. S. North, Tom Thatcher, Jan van der Watt, and Catrin Williams, as well as Paul Anderson, John Donahue, Michael Gorman, and Jaime Clark-Soles. For further information, contact Craig Koester (ckoester@luthersem.edu) or Michael Gorman (mgorman@stmarys.edu). 
Registration begins June 1

11/23- 11/26

SBL Annual Meeting 
The SBL Annual Meeting is the largest gathering of biblical scholars in the world. Each meeting showcases the latest in biblical research, fosters collegial contacts, advances research, and focuses on issues of the profession. The Annual Meeting will be held in Baltimore, Maryland.
More information 

December 2013

12/31

Deadline for Member Profile Drawing
Fill out your new member profile to be entered into a drawing to receive one of two iPads! You can access the SBL member profile by logging in to the SBL website with your SBLID number. Once you have logged in to the website, click on “my profile” in the Login Box. On the next screen, click on the “Edit Button” under Member Profile.
Read why it is so important to have a majority of members represented.

January 2014

1/2-1/5

Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America 
LSA’s 2014 Annual Meeting will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota
More information 

1/2- 1/5

AIA and APA Joint Annual Meeting 
The Joint Annual Meeting (AM) of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the American Philological Association (APA) will be held in Chicago, IL at the Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel. The academic program will begin on January 3.
More information 

1/6

Call for Papers Deadline 
Rewriting in Luke and Acts: A Conference on Luke’s Literary Creativity, to be held 22-25 June 2014 in Roskilde, Denmark. 
For more information please see the June 22-25 entry.

1/15

Call for Papers Deadline 
Political Memory in and after the Persian Empire will be held will be held in Leiden on 18, 19 and 20 June 2014. 
The significance of Achaemenid imperial hegemony for the political thought and aspirations of subject and successor societies is evaluated in starkly different terms in the various disciplines studying the ancient Near East. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus’s heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a “kingless era” in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule.

The aim of this conference is to examine local responses to the loss of native kingship in the subject areas of the Persian Empire, both in terms of political reaction and literary reflection. 

Abstracts of no more than 400 words are invited until 15 January 2014. (send to either j.m.silverman@hum.leidenuniv.nl or jason.m.silverman@gmail.com). 

The conference is organized as part of the ERC project BABYLON at the Leiden Institute of Area Studies. There are plans to publish the proceedings.
More information 

1/15

Application Deadline-CFP 
The University of Southern California's West Semitic Research Project (http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp) is looking for another round of applicants for training in Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI.)
USC'S TRAINING Program is for scholars, conservators, library and museum professionals, archivists and researchers. Participants are trained in the use of Reflectance Transformation imaging (RTI) for documenting ancient texts and artifacts, including the loan of imaging equipment.The objective of this project is to develop an infrastructure for training scholars in the use of RTI technology and subsequently to lend the necessary imaging equipment to participants in the training program so they can do an initial RTI documentation project either in field environments (archaeological sites, etc.) or in libraries, museums and/or other similar venues, worldwide (for examples of RTI images see this video. 
This initial undertaking should be understood to be a pilot project that can develop into an ongoing, broader documentary effort and preferably may also serve as the catalyst for establishing a scholarly network consortium for image documentation of a given corpus (or corpora) of ancient texts and/or artifacts. All equipment to be lent out is both rugged and compact and is thus ideal for doing sophisticated imaging in remote locations. Twenty awards over three years (approximately seven per year) for traineeships will be provided based on the merit and intrinsic importance of a proposed pilot imaging project as well as the appropriateness of the subject matter for RTI imaging. 
More information or see http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp/projects/imls.shtml, or contact Marilyn Lundberg (mlundber@usc.edu) or Bruce Zuckerman (bzuckerm@usc.edu).

1/30-2/1

Exploring New Frontiers for Post-western Biblical Studies
The Biblical Studies Department of the United Theological College, Bangalore, India, is organizing Bible Darshan, an International Conference from January 30-Feb.1, 2014, in Bangalore, India on the theme: Exploring New Frontiers for Post-western Biblical Studies 
Coordinator: Dr. Dexter S. Maben 
 More information