Programme

Day 1 — 4 November

13:00–13:30 | Reception & Registration
13:30–14:00 | Welcome and Introduction - Francesca Fiaschetti / Salvatore Liccardo (ÖAW)

Session I — Empires and their Shadows in Early Medieval Eurasia (14:00–16:30)

14:00–14:40 | Jonathan Shepard (Oxford University) - Soft Power, Make Believe, Fear: Keeping Up Appearances as a World Power
14:40–15:20 | Cristina La Rocca (Università degli Studi di Padova) - Building an Empire Through Women: The Example of Theoderic

15:20–15:50 | Coffee Break

15:50–16:30 | Khodadad Rezakhani (ÖAW) - Cyrus, Dariush, Xerxes, and the Rest: Achaemenid Legacies in Medieval and Modern Iran

Keynote I (17:00–18:30)

Marina Mogilner (University of Illinois Chicago) - Rediscovering Missionaries and Missionary Ethnography in the Russian Imperial Past – a Case of “Imperial” Amnesia 

Dinner

Day 2 — 5 November

Session II — The Symbolic Capital of Empires in High and Late Medieval Eurasia (09:30–12:00)

09:30–10:10 | Reinier Langelaar (ÖAW) - Emulating the Emperor: Post-Imperial Tibetan Buddhist Kingship
10:10–10:50 | Petra Melichar (Czech Academy of Sciences) - Reflecting the Empire in Late Byzantine Historiography

10:50–11:20 | Coffee Break

11:20–12:00 | Lorenzo Pubblici (Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”) - Rule as Mediation: The Mongols and the Invention of Contested Sovereignty between Europe and Caucasia

12:00–14:00 | Lunch Break

Session III — Authority and Memory in Late Medieval and Early Modern Empires (14:00–16:30)

14:00–14:40 | Bernd Schneidmüller (Universität Heidelberg) - The Imperiality of the Medieval Holy Roman Empire
14:40–15:20 | Evrim Binbas (Universität Bonn) - The Timurid Historian Natanzi (fl. 1416) on the Mongol Empire

15:20–15:50 | Coffee Break

15:50–16:30 | Tijana Krstić (Central European University) - An Ottoman Prince Who Wanted to Be the Emperor of “Illyria”?
An Entangled History of Empire-, Nation- and Confession-Building in 16th- and 17th-Century Ottoman Rumeli

Keynote II (17:00–18:30)

Pieter Judson (European University Institute) - Is There a Post-Imperial in Habsburg Central Europe?

Dinner

Day 3 — 6 November

Session IV — The Afterlife of Empires in the 19th, 20th, and 21st Centuries (09:30–11:30)

09:30–10:10 | Igor Torbakov (Uppsala University) / Rustam Shukurov (ÖAW) - Imperial “Anticolonialism”: The Russian Eurasianism and Its Critique in the Former Imperial Borderlands

10:10–10:50 | Paolo Sartori (ÖAW) - Andijan après Andijan: The Long Shadow of Imperial Islamophobia Across the Soviet Century

10:50–11:30 | Isabelle Charleux (CNRS) - One Heritage, Two Histories: Representations and the Rewriting of the History of the Steppe Empires at the Chinggis Khaan National Museum (Mongolia, 2022) and the Inner Mongolia Museum (China, 2025)

11:30–12:00 | Coffee Break

Closing Remarks & Final Discussion (12:00–13:00) Walter Pohl (ÖAW)