What does power abuse look and feel like in the academic world? How does it affect university faculty, students, education and research? What can we do to counteract and prevent power abuse? These questions are addressed in this collection of autobiographical poems, essays and illustrations about academia. The contributors reflect on individual experiences as well as underlying institutional structures, providing original perspectives on bullying, sexual harassment, discrimination, and other forms of power abuse in academic workplaces. They share their stories in order to break the culture of silence around power abuse in academia and point out pathways for constructive change.

"Space Matters!" claimed Doreen Massey and John Allen at the heart of the Spatial Turn developments (1984). Compensating a four-decades shortfall, this collective volume is the first reader in Byzantine spatial studies. It contextualizes the spatial turn in historical studies by means of interdisciplinary dialogue. An introduction offers an up-to-date state of the art. Twenty-nine case studies provide a wide range of different conceptualizations of space in Byzantine culture articulated in a single collection through a variety of topics and approaches. An afterword frames the future challenges of Byzantine spatial studies in a changing world where space is a claim and a precarious social value. Contributors are Ilias Anagnostakis, Alexander Beihammer, Helena Bodin, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Beatrice Caseau Chevallier, Paolo Cesaretti, Michael J. Decker, Veronica della Dora, Rico Franses, Sauro Gelichi, Adam J. Goldwyn, Basema Hamarneh, Richard Hodges, Brad Hostetler, Adam Izdebski, Liz James, P. Nick Kardulias, Isabel Kimmelfield, Tonia Kiousopoulou, Johannes Koder, Derek Krueger, Tomasz Labuk, Maria Leontsini, Yulia Mantova, Charis Messis, Konstantinos Moustakas, Margaret Mullett, Ingela Nilsson, Robert G. Ousterhout, Georgios Pallis, Myrto Veikou, Joanita Vroom, David Westberg, and Enrico Zanini.

Round Trip to Hades in the Eastern Mediterranean Tradition explores how the theme of visiting the Underworld and returning alive has been treated, transmitted and transformed in the ancient Greek and Byzantine traditions. The journey was usually a descent (katabasis) into a dark and dull place, where forgetfulness and punishment reigned, but since 'everyone' was there, it was also a place that offered opportunities to meet people and socialize. Famous Classical round trips to Hades include those undertaken by Odysseus and Aeneas, but this pagan topic also caught the interest of Christian writers. The contributions of the present volume allow the reader to follow the passage from pagan to Christian representations of Hades-a passage that may seem surprisingly effortless.

This volume places the satirical works of the Middle Byzantine period in a wider political and socio-cultural context, exploring not only their various forms but also their functions and meanings. The volume is divided into four parts. The first part provides the backgrounds of the authors and texts discussed in the volume. The second concerns the manifold functions and appearances of Byzantine satirical texts. Part three offers detailed analyses of three largely unexplored texts (the Charidemos, the Philopatris, and the Anacharsis). The last section moves from the individual texts to the larger picture of satirical modes in Middle Byzantium. Contributors are Baukje van den Berg, Floris Bernard, Stavroula Constantinou, Eric Cullhed, Janek Kucharski, Marketa Kulhankova, Paul Magdalino, Henry Maguire, Przemyslaw Marciniak, Charis Messis, Ingela Nilsson, Emilie van Opstall, Panagiotis Roilos, and Nikos Zagklas. See inside the book.

In twelfth-century Constantinople, writers worked on commission for the imperial family or aristocratic patrons. Texts were occasioned by specific events, representing both a link between writer and patron and between literary imagination and empirical reality. This is a study of how one such writer, Constantine Manasses, achieved that aim. Manasses depicted and praised the present by drawing from the rich sources of the Graeco-Roman and Biblical tradition, thus earning commissions from wealthy 'friends' during a career that spanned more than three decades. While the occasional literature of writers like Manasses has sometimes been seen as 'empty rhetoric', devoid of literary ambition, this study assumes that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional writing was central, called for a strong and individual authorial presence, since voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.

The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of Modern Greek literature.

In twelfth-century Constantinople, writers worked on commission for the imperial family or aristocratic patrons. Texts were occasioned by specific events, representing both a link between writer and patron and between literary imagination and empirical reality. This is a study of how one such writer, Constantine Manasses, achieved that aim. Manasses depicted and praised the present by drawing from the rich sources of the Graeco-Roman and Biblical tradition, thus earning commissions from wealthy 'friends' during a career that spanned more than three decades. While the occasional literature of writers like Manasses has sometimes been seen as 'empty rhetoric', devoid of literary ambition, this study assumes that writing on command privileges originality and encourages the challenging of conventions. A society like twelfth-century Byzantium, in which occasional writing was central, called for a strong and individual authorial presence, since voice was the primary instrument for a successful career.

The corpus of Palaiologan romances consists of about a dozen works of imaginative fiction from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries which narrate the trials and tribulations of aristocratic young lovers. This volume brings together leading scholars of Byzantine literature to examine the corpus afresh and aims to be the definitive work on the subject, suitable for scholars and students of all levels. It offers interdisciplinary and transnational approaches which demonstrate the aesthetic and cultural value of these works in their own right and their centrality to the medieval and early modern Greek, European and Mediterranean literary traditions. From a historical perspective, the volume also emphasizes how the romances represent a turning point in the history of Greek letters: they are a repository of both ancient and medieval oral poetic and novelistic traditions and yet are often considered the earliest works of Modern Greek literature.

The intricate relationship between the erotic and the literary is a recurring theme in Western literature, with a starting-point in Plato's dialogues. Our need to talk, write, and read about love has resulted in a rich tradition, ranging from theoretical and philosophical discussions of Eros to love romance and poetry, clearly marked by the classical heritage but continuously unfolding and rewriting itself. The essays in this volume aim at providing both students and scholars with a series of discussions of this long tradition of reading and writing the erotic, seen from a number of different perspectives. A certain emphasis is placed on Classical philology, and in particular Greek and Roman love poetry from Antiquity to the Byzantine period. The contributors examine texts by Plato, Catullus, Sulpicia, Meleager and Niketas Choniates among others; but the anthology also offers more general treatments within the fields of Byzantine Studies, Iranian Languages, History of Ideas and Comparative Literature. Across this range of writers and disciplines, this collection of essays offers stimulating and original perspectives on how Eros has been appropriated in a variety of ways for purposes of producing narratives of love. Contributors: Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis, Anders Cullhed, Tomas Hagg, Regina Hoeschele, Dimitrios Iordanoglou, Mats Persson, Mathilde Skoie, Bo Utas, David Westberg, Tim Whitmarsh