23 September 2026 at 18.00 to 25 September 2026 at 15.30
Gosposka Hall at ZM GIAM ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana (pre-event)
Atrium ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana (conference)
DESCRIPTION
Prosopography is, simply speaking, the scholarly and historical study of individuals (from the Greek prosōpon, meaning “person”) and groups of people, with particular attention to the ways in which they relate to and interact with one another. It provides a methodological tool for analysing individuals, their actions, and their representations.
Historical sources rarely make the homo accessible as a biographical totality; rather, they render individuals identifiable through particular personae: as holders of offices, members of families or institutions, participants in transactions, correspondents, patrons, witnesses, authors, or bearers of names and titles. In this sense, the immediate object of prosopographical inquiry might be understood not as the human being per se, but as the historically legible prosōpon or persona: the individual as they become identifiable through particular attributes, relations, actions, and representations.
This is also what the present conference seeks to explore. The contributions gathered here move across periods, regions, genres, and types of evidence – from antiquity and the medieval world to modern and contemporary contexts, from archival and epigraphic traces to literature, material culture, institutional memory, and digital data. Some begin with individuals, others with families, clans, institutions, or networks; some encounter persons in historical records, others in literary and legendary narratives; still others ask how identities and relationships can be represented, modelled, connected, and visualised through digital technologies. What they share is an interest in the many ways in which persons become historically legible, and in what can be learned when individual traces are placed in relation to one another. In this sense, the breadth of approaches, texts, and technologies represented here is not incidental to prosopography but characteristic of its potential: to move from persons to relations, and from relations towards a richer understanding of the historical worlds they inhabited.
The conference will be held in English.
Program booklet.
Organised by the Institute of Cultural History ZRC SAZU, this conference is funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) within the research programme The (New) Cultural History of Intellectual Heritage: Slovenian Historical Space in Its European Context (P6-0440).
