BA Students, invited to apply to the short CIVIS course “Religion and power in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages”

CIVIS announces the opening of the registration for the CIVIS course “Religion and power in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages”. The programme invites students to discover how the interaction between political power and Christianity, Judaism, Early Islam, and other religious currents shaped cultural and religious identities in the broader Eastern Mediterranean. It will take place in a blended format between March and July 2022 and is organised in two parts:

• From March to June, seminar sessions will be held in rotation in Tübingen, Athens, and Stockholm. Students that are not residing in each respective hosting city will attend these sessions online.
• In the first week of July 2022, a field trip will be organised in Athens. Selected students will be supported by a grant for physical mobility. This second part of the course is organised in plenary sessions that will take place in actual sites connected with the object of the course (late antique religious sites, museums, and monasteries in Attika). During these sessions, the assigned students will present their presentations.

This blended mobility CIVIS course aims to familiarise Bachelor’s students with the transformation of Christianity and the broader religious landscape after the 4th century. During the course, professors and students will analyse the relation of this transformation with the then refurbished model of a Christian empire. There will be a focus on the impact of this process on the emergence of the so-called Byzantine Christianity in the East, the native peripheral Christianity in Asia (Syria, Armenia) and Africa (Coptic, Ethiopic, Nubian Christians), as well as the transformation of the broader religious landscape concerning Judaism, “marginal” religious currents such as Gnosticism and apocalypticism.

Finally, the course will highlight the consequences of the addressed topics to Early Islam and its millennial features during the Meccan period.

This short term mobility course is open to Bachelor’s students at one of the CIVIS member universities, enrolled in or having a strong interest in the following fields of studies:  Theology, Religious Studies, History, Cultural Studies, or related. The course is offered primarily in English. It can be offered in German as an alternative only if all the participants are German-speaking. As such, a B2 level in English (or German) is required.

Applicants should send their CV, a cover letter (max 500 words) and a transcript of records from their home university by 15 December 2021 to dmoscho@theol.uoa.gr. Selected students will be notified on 30 January 2022.

Assessment

The participants will be evaluated after regular attendance and active involvement in presentations during the second part of the course or based on the writing of short essays at the end of the course.

The evaluation criteria are more specifically the following:

• Regular attendance of the sessions
• Active participation in the Seminar discussion and in-depth understanding of the relevant bibliography which will be given
• Well documented presentation of an assigned topic or successful answers to relevant questions in a written essay at the end of the course

More details about the intensive CIVIS Course “Religion and power in the Eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages” are available on the CIVIS webpage here.

CIVIS is a European Civic University formed by the alliance of nine leading research higher education institutions across Europe: Aix-Marseille Université, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Universitatea din București, Université libre de Bruxelles, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Sapienza Università di Roma, Stockholm University, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and University of Glasgow. It brings together a community of more than 450,000 students and 65,000 staff members including 30,000 academics and researchers. Recently, CIVIS was joined by Paris Lodron University of Salzburg.