The following workshops are available as part of the Τhe Birmingham Classical and Byzantine Greek Summer School 2020.
Palaeography
A series of three introductory workshops to Byzantine palaeography will be offered to the participants in the Level 3 course. There will a discussion on scribal practices, and the presentation and circulation of texts in Byzantine manuscripts. During the workshops, participants will read, transcribe and translate facsimiles of manuscripts. No background knowledge of palaeography is required. The workshop will be convened by Dr Foteini Spingou.
Numismatics
The workshop will introduce participants to the basic principles of numismatics – typology, iconography, inscriptions of coins – and analyse the contribution of the numismatic evidence to the understanding of political and economic history of Byzantium. It will offer a hands-on look at remarkable Byzantine coins at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, part of the University of Birmingham, which has a rich collection of Byzantine coins. The workshop will be convened by Dr Maria Vrij.
Online resources for Classicists and Byzantinists
Participants will be introduced and instructed on how to use the most important online resources and databases available to Classicists and Byzantinists, namely the TLG and the Perseus (Lexica and text databases), Pinakes (for palaeography), the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams (for poetry) and the TextTopos (for geography). Dr Theofili Kampianaki will be the convener of the workshop.
Material culture for teachers
This workshop is aimed specifically to teachers who teach Classics-related subjects at secondary education. It will offer some guidelines as to how objects of material culture, e.g. coins or artefacts, can be used as historical evidence for the purposes of their teaching and complement the narrative of the historical sources which appear in their textbooks. The workshop will be convened by Dr Daniel Reynolds.
The new OCR Classics Specifications
Τhe second workshop designed specifically for teachers of the GCSE and A Level Ancient History and Classical Civilisations specifications, in which new topics were recently introduced. The workshop will provide important clarifications of the new topics and suggest complementary materials, such as texts and online resources, which can be used in addition to the textbooks. The workshop will be convened by Dr Elena Theodorakopoulos.