The PAIXUE Team

Niels Gaul co-directs, together with Curie Virág, the PAIXUE project. His research focuses on the middle and, especially, later Byzantine empire; his recent work has looked at various types of social performances – be it in the form of rhetorical ‘theatre’ or (staged) miracles –, at the scholarly networks permeating Byzantine society and at the so-called ‘classical tradition’ from the ninth through fourteenth centuries. As part of the PAIXUE project, he is writing a monograph (very) provisionally entitled Classicising Learning in Byzantium: Towards a Sociology of Paideia in the Medieval Eastern Roman Empire, and co-authoring articles with Curie Virág and Michael Höckelmann.

Foteini Spingou specialises in the history of the eastern Mediterranean of the 9th to 14th c. Bridging the fields of social history, philology and art history, her work contextualises past behaviours and aesthetics codes in the medieval East Mediterranean within political and social developments. Foteini's first monograph (Words and Artworks in Byzantium, Tolworth 2021)  is a pioneering treatment of twelfth-century Greek epigrams on artworks using SNA and quantitative analysis to demonstrate the text's role as social commodities able to nurture networks, amplify an individual’s cultural capital, and initiate personal rituals. She is currently working on a monograph on reflections on the concept of beauty (kallos) over the longue durée. She is also the editor of a vast collection with medieval texts on Byzantine Art and Aesthetics (c.1081-c.1350) in eight medieval languages. She is currently co-editing (together with Curie Virág) a volume on performances of classicising learning in medieval Eurasia.

Defangyu is a research associate on the PAIXUE team. He focuses on the performative situations and instances of classicising learning in Tang and Song China. Defangyu is a second year PhD student supervised by Prof. Niels Gaul, Dr Yannis Stouraitis and Prof. Michael Höckelmann. His doctoral research is a comparative study on female rule/regency and literati elites in the Tang-Song China and the middle Byzantine period, with particular focus on the role of literati and classicising learning with regard to these rules. There are three main strands within his research. First, the research aims to discover how female rulers built up the legitimacy of their reigns within a conservative and patriarchal society. Second, the research examines how the Byzantine and Chinese literati, whose ideologies were considerably shaped by classicising learning, considered the legitimacy of female rulership and how these considerations affected their interactions and relationships with the female monarchs. Finally, the research traces the evolution of the literati’s evaluations and descriptions of female rulership over time.

Ivan Marić is a research assistant on the PAIXUE team, focusing on literary performances of Byzantine literati between eighth and tenth centuries. Ivan's PhD, supervised by Prof. Niels Gaul and Dr. Tom Brown, is an interdisciplinary examination of models of imperial authority under the first two emperors of the Isaurian dynasty—Leo III and Constantine V—and their highly-contested legacy during the iconoclast controversy and its aftermath (c. 726-870). The thesis traces how the two rulers became popular and appealing imperial models in their own time, and how this image has been challenged and deconstructed, and a revised, politically appropriate version of history inserted in public discourse. Ivan is preparing a chapter on the effects of the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717-718 on Leo III's ideology and expansion of the cult of the cross in Constantinople for an edited volume on Religion and War from Antiquity to Early Modernity.

Mark is a research assistant on the PAIXUE team. He focuses on cataloguing Middle Byzantine literati and their various literary performances, both public and private. Mark is a 4th-year PhD student of Prof. Niels Gaul and Dr. Sara Parvis at the University of Edinburgh's School of History, Classics and Archaeology. More specifically, for the duration of the 4th year of his doctoral study, he has taken up a Pre-Doctoral Junior Fellowship at the ANAMED Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations of Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey, where he will be completing his doctoral research on the reception of John Chrysostom in the Middle Byzantine period (9th-13th c.). His research includes the first critical edition of the most popular text attributed to Chrysostom by the Byzantines, the so-called Catechetical Homily on Pascha, in addition to tracing the effects of Chrysostom's rising popularity in Middle Byzantium through written and material sources, such as manuscripts, seals, icons, encomia, saint's lives and other sources.

Lucia Michielin is the Database Developer, and her task is to develop the Edinburgh Database of Byzantine Literati further and maintain it. She got her MA and Scuola di Specializzazione degrees at the University of Padua (Italy) on Roman Archaeology. In 2010 she attended a master in Geotechnologies for Archaeology at the University of Siena (Italy), with a focus on GIS, Databases, and 3D reconstructions. Since then she specialised in the field of Digital Humanities taking part in numerous projects in UK and Europe. She earned a PhD in Classics at the University of Edinburgh with a research project about the role of doors and windows within domestic spaces in Imperial Italy. In her thesis, ‘Fores et fenestrae. A computational study of doors and windows in Roman domestic space,’ she applied computational approach to the analysis the impact of openings in the architecture and everyday life of Roman houses.