Joint Field Work on Late Antiquity

The  Joint Field Work Course Unit on Late Antiquity involves 20 graduate students and 10 undergraduate students each year in an integrated course unit carried out jointly in the second semester. Within the course students work in transnational groups on research dealing with the annual working topic: Capital cities in Late Antiquity as a case study and can then discuss their findings during a field trip in Italy in the month of June.

Due to the panedemic emergency the field trip will be substituted by online exchange activities with experts on the field.

A tangible result of the study meetings between UNIBO and UdEM

See the new publication (full text online):

Città e capitali nella tarda antichità

A cura di Beatrice Girotti e Christian R. Raschle

Milano , LED,  2020 ISBN 978-88-7916-945-5

Historiography, politics, urban spaces, sustainability, cultural memory, law, religion, aristocracies, groups and institutions that in various historical moments have built a specific identity for a specific city are just some of the points that gravitate around the fulcrum of this volume, and that is, the history of capitals and cities in late antiquity. Starting from Rome, from its changes and transformations faced following the creation of other capitals, the contributions collected here offer an updated overview by presenting some case studies ranging from the Eastern and Western Roman Empire and exploring the possibility of interregional comparisons. The comparison between historical developments in different geographic areas and the existing interconnections, the analysis of autonomous and perfectly coherent or partially coherent worlds beyond the approaches of the individual essays find the underlying reason in the overall theme that revolves around Rome, eternal capital, and its relations with other cities and capitals which repeatedly underline the 'Roman' dimension of the world, defined in its extension and boundaries as a function of intellectual and political education. A variety of ideas are therefore presented here which offer on the institutional and political level, but also on the ideological and symbolic one, few examples that can be evidence of continuity and change with previous centuries as they play a focal role in the machine of representation of power and the search for consent.