From January 24 to 26, 2024 in the New Conference (Mirror) Hall of the Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski" the international scholarly conference "Transfer and Adaptation: Languages and Cultures in Dialogue (The Balkans from Late Antiquity to Early Modern Times)" will be held. The event is organized by the Institute of Balkan Studies & Centre of Tracology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung with the financial support of the Bulgarian National Science Fund, contract No. КП-06-МНФ/21 dated 08/08/2023.
The aim of the forum is to bring together specialists from different fields to discuss in a scholarly discourse the dialogue between different cultures, which is realised through literary contacts mediated by language - translations, the transmission of ideas and realities, cultural exchanges and the circulation of ideas, ideologies and religious doctrines in a multilingual environment. The main focus of scholarly interest is the Balkans, especially in the earlier periods of its history - late antiquity, the Middle Ages, early modernity, when the coexistence of representatives of different languages and ethnicities strongly influenced the transmission of ideas and the exchange of intellectual and cultural achievements. The second main interest of the Forum is Byzantium and the Slavic world and the transfer of texts and ideas between them. Several thematic areas are envisaged:
- linguistic contact as a medium for the exchange of ideas;
- the mobility of texts;
- adaptation in and through translation.
The scholarly papers will approach the issues through the prism of Medieval Studies, Classical Philology, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, History, Theology, and Literature, thus creating a multidisciplinary environment for generating new approaches to the study of intellectual heritage and cultural antiquity - in and through language. The proceedings will be published in Scripta et e-Scripta (Scopus) after double anonymous peer review, probably by the end of 2024.