Job Talks: Assistant Professor in Historical Studies and Digital Humanities at Central European University, Vienna
In the Caucasus, and especially Georgia, the high medieval period looms large in historiography. As a period of Georgian royal power projection and of the production of significant cultural artefacts, the eleventh to early thirteenth centuries have formed a crucial part both of historic political identity formation and of modern cultural memories of the medieval past. Despite this significance, assessments of relevant historiography are often somewhat limited in the international literature, and serious assessments of popular historiographies and the modern reception of the medieval Caucasus are even more significantly lacking. This is despite significant political and cultural investment in Georgian medievalisms, including not only museums and historic sites but invocations in the public sphere from political rhetoric to videogames. Issues of provenance, authority, and ownership of the Caucasus’ past are very much alive today.
This talk will assess some of the current state of the field and the speaker’s research to date, and then move on to consider how we might tackle these questions of how historians and the public alike frame their mental models of the medieval past. The paper will propose a hybrid strategy, where digital modelling frameworks and traditional historiographical assessment provide a backbone for re-evaluating the period, and reception studies then help situate that re-assessment alongside contemporary historical thought. Such a combination of approaches may collectively offer a route to improve how we imagine and reimagine this critical period in the history of not only Georgia but the wider Caucasus region and beyond.
James Baillie is a member of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where he works on humanities data modelling for historical research on the Caucasus, Iran, and central Asia. He is a specialist on medieval Georgia and a co-convenor of the Medieval Caucasus Network, and has an ongoing project towards building a digital prosopography of the region in the 12th century. His further research interests include the ludic reception of the medieval period more widely, especially as the lead organiser of the Coding Medieval Worlds workshop series, and researching how digital data systems encode and reinforce historical arguments and ideas about the past.