Scientific Network: Power Elites during Changes of Rulership and Religion

8. Mai 2025, von AAI Webmaster

On 8–10 May 2025, SCORE team member Alasdair took part at the University of Konstanz in the second meeting of the DFG Scientific Network, ‘Power Elites during Changes of Rulership and Religion: Transcultural Perspectives (c.500–1600)’, led by Eric Böhme. The network is formed of a group of mostly young scholars working on contexts ranging from China to Britain to Central America. Alasdair’s case study focuses on the experience of the Armenian power elite during its 260 or so years as a province of the early Islamic Empire (c. 640–900). He is taking a quantitative approach, working with prosopographical and onomastic data to attempt to establish how the distribution of families, naming practices and conversion to Islam changed over time. The results of the network are planned for publication in a multi-author volume in due course.