Call for Papers
Conference:
Greek Geography in the Roman Imperial Period:
Reception, Transformation, Innovation.
Bologna, November 5th/6th 2026
(German and Italian texts below)
The University of Bologna, Department of History and Cultures (Mattia Vitelli Casella), in collaboration with
the Geographi Latini Online (Niklas Fröhlich, KU Eichstätt-Ingolstadt), is hosting an academic conference in
Bologna on November 5th–6th 2026 on the topic “Greek Geography in the Roman Imperial Period.”
The conference will address current methodological and practical questions regarding the reception and
appropriation of traditional Greek geographical knowledge – across all subdisciplines of classical studies.
This includes, in particular, Greek and Latin texts and traditions from the Imperial period through Late
Antiquity, as well as the new possibilities offered by digital exploration and representation. The conference is
open to scholars from all disciplines (history, classical philology, church history, numismatics, epigraphy,
digital humanities, etc.) and at all academic levels. We look forward to a wide range of diverse contributions,
whether from advanced projects and research initiatives or from explorations of new questions and
perspectives.
We would like to receive proposals for presentations (approximately 20–30 minutes in length) in the form
of an abstract of no more than 1,500 characters (including spaces) along with a brief biographical
introduction by June 30, 2026, via email to both of the following addresses: mattia.vitelli@unibo.it and
niklas.froehlich@ku.de. If you have any questions, please contact us at the same email addresses. Proposals
(and any form of questions) are welcome in English, Italian, German, French or Spanish.
You will receive notification of the acceptance of your contribution in early July 2026.
More detailed introduction:
Strabo states twice in the Prolegomena of his Geography that he lives in a very favourable period for
geographical research, because Roman expansion and Roman rule had allowed knowledge to increase
significantly. In fact, many parts of the world were previously impossible to visit, and therefore previous
authors were not able to deal with them. With the Imperial Period, however, a new era began in the
Mediterranean world from many points of view, and certainly not least from a geographical perspective. Not
only were new lands discovered and described to the reading public, but also the ‚old known world‘, of course,
continued to be treated, both under the influence of the new realities of the ‚Pax Romana‘ and on the basis of
established, predominantly Greek, traditions of geographical knowledge. The main question we therefore pose
is: What was the way of approaching Greek geographic knowledge in the literature during the Imperial age
and into Late Antiquity? And more precisely: Was it presented as a fundamental and unchanged matter, as
before? Was it used, but completely revised and updated with reference to the new situation? How did the very
concepts of geographic works and their approach to world description change with regard to the modus
operandi of an individual author? What role did the new opportunities for travel and firsthand experiences play,
as it is often emphasized, for example, in the case of the ‚travelling author‘ Pausanias? How did such
perspectives relate to established textual traditions and scholarly desk research, as traditionally emphasized in
the case of, for example, Claudius Ptolemy? What role did established literary and scientific practices and
genres play in this? What can a closer look on documentary sources contribute to these issues?
And, last but not least: How were Greek literary forms and knowledge traditions taken up, continued, or
transformed by Latin authors? In fact, practically all Latin geographical texts fall within this exact period, and
throughout them, the question of dependence on and use of (Greek?) sources is of central importance. The
question also arises for Christian texts, such as the Diamerisms (from around the 2nd/3rd century AD), which
categorize the peoples of the earth on the basis of biblical interpretations and various, heterogeneous sources,
and whose Latin representatives are all direct translations and adaptations of Greek originals. In order to
incorporate these and other, regularly understudied, Latin geographical texts from the imperial period (and
their Greek sources) more effectively, the conference will be realized in cooperation with the Geographi Latini
Online: the Germany-based long-term editorial project (Universities of Eichstätt/Ingolstadt and Cologne) is
currently re-editing and re-exploring many of these texts both by means of new critical editions with historical-
philological commentaries and digital cartographic projections. Accordingly, the conference will also
explicitly include perspectives on new digital methods: How can the geographical worldviews of the imperial
era and their evolution be evaluated and represented, for example, through digital projections? How can source
dependencies and, conversely, innovations be explored using modern (digital) corpus linguistics?
The conference aims to bring together these many subfields beyond disciplinary boundaries (history, philology,
patristics, geography, digital humanities etc.) and combine them in a joint exploration of “Greek Geography
in the Roman Imperial period.”
The principal organizers:
Dr. Mattia Vitelli Casella
Università di Bologna
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Sezione di Storia Antica
Via Zamboni, 38
Bologna
mattia.vitelli@unibo.it
Dr. Niklas Fröhlich
Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt
DFG-Projekt Geographi Latini Online
Alte Geschichte
Universitätsallee 1
85072 Eichstätt
niklas.froehlich@ku.de