CML's Chiara D'Agostini Wins First Place Award for Conference Paper

PhD student at CML Chiara D'Agostini wins the first place award of the Tousimis Award. The Tousimis Award is given annually to the best graduate student papers at the Byzantine Studies Conference.

The award was given for her paper "Mapping the Empire: A New Perspective on the Revival of Ptolemaic Cartography in Byzantium" at the 2018 conference of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America. In the paper Chiara presented a new view on the reception of Ptolemy’s Geography in late 13th-century Byzantium by focusing on the epigrams devoted by Maximus Planudes to his rediscovery of Ptolemy’s work. With a different approach from the studies mainly focused on textual tradition, she considered the cultural and political context in which the new interest for geographic knowledge developed. In particular, taking cues from Gregory’s insights in the imperial constructions of space, she looked at what Planudes’ epigrams can tell us about late 13th-century Byzantine ‘geographical imagination’.

Chiara wrote about her experience giving the paper at the conference last year in a CML blog post  - find it on the CML Blog.