For the 2024 Annual Meeting, we invite proposals for one open session for which papers on any aspect of Syriac Studies are welcome, and three thematic sessions.
In our session on Syriac Chronicles: Identity and Community Formation we hope to address questions such as: How did one tell a history, one’s own or that of others? What should be remembered, how and why? What qualities do the literary features of Syriac chronicles add to the narrative content they offer?
A second thematic panel, on Genre and Performance in late antique Syriac Christianity, invites scholars to ask: How and what does performance contribute to our understanding of different categories of Syriac literature? Whom did performance include or exclude, with what impact on the literary genre and its content? What are the implications for the literary, social and cultural issues of late antique Christianity more broadly?
Our third thematic session, co-sponsored by the program unit on Jewish Christianity, invites proposals on Manichaeans: Real and Imagined. Here we hope also to raise broader questions regarding the location of Manichaeism within and beyond the boundaries of Syriac Studies, and in conversation with adjacent fields, including heresiology, late antique Judaism, and liturgy.