British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The Overseas Schools and Institutes
A First BIRTHA Conference

A conference to be held at the
Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Bristol

21st-23rd June 2008

Supported also by the British Academy

Our meeting will be concerned, in broad, with the phenomenon of national schools and institutes that are engaged in the study of the ancient world and related topics, such as the British School at Athens, the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, the French School in Rome, or the German Archaeological Institutes. These institutions, which fully emerged in the nineteenth century (even if in some cases they had illustrious ancestors) continue to be founded and flourish until today, and almost all colleagues engaged in humanities research abroad have had some contact with them. Nevertheless, they have received negligible scholarly comparative attention. There are erudite works concerning individual schools, often written for official purposes, but the wider social and comparative context has been taken into consideration very rarely.

This neglect is in spite of the enormous variety of highly relevant issues that come to mind the moment this question is considered: amongst these are the relationship between heritage, culture and nationalism; the relevance of the schools and institutes for our understanding of European cultural history; the relationship between international scholarship and local intellectual currents; the role of respective schools as representatives of their particular country; the function of archaeological excavation in the creation of the prestige of a country, and so on. In terms of subject matter, we will begin our conference by examining the origins of this phenomenon in modern France, then move on to the schools and institutes; growth and extent today in comparative terms; on their organisation (each nation is slightly different in the way that they run their respective schools); on their interaction with their host communities; on the way that the knowledge gleaned through the schools is used is reflected in the wider scholarly community. Of particular relevance is the way that the Schools and Institutes overseas are viewed by those who work with them, the relationships that have been formed, the way that they may create a micro-climate of scholarly activity that may play a very significant part or otherwise influence the creation of the scholarly record of the past.

The conference emerges from the Ruins workshop, a joint co-operation between the Universities of Bristol and Pisa. The organisers would be pleased to hear from researchers working in the field of the Schools and Institutes, and equally to receive any reports or descriptions from individual schools and institutes that they would be able to display over the days of the conference.

British Academy sponsored schools and institutes may wish to note that Dr Bill Finlayson, Director for British Research in the Levant, Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Director of the British School at Rome, and Margot Jackson, Manager of the BASIS funding programme at the British Academy, will be participating in the meeting.

For further information, please contact:

Dr David Shankland (Bristol) email: D.P.Shankland@bris.ac.uk
Professor Giovanni Salmeri (Pisa) email: salmeri@tiscali.it