Prosopography – Approaches, Texts and Technologies

Prosopography is, simply speaking, the scholarly and historical study of individuals (from the Greek prosōpon, meaning “person”) and groups of people, with particular attention to the ways in which they relate to and interact with one another. It provides a methodological tool for analysing individuals, their actions, and their representations.

Historical sources rarely make the homo accessible as a biographical totality; rather, they render individuals identifiable through particular personae: as holders of offices, members of families or institutions, participants in transactions, correspondents, patrons, witnesses, authors, or bearers of names and titles. In this sense, the immediate object of prosopographical inquiry might be understood not as the human being per se, but as the historically legible prosōpon or persona: the individual as they become identifiable through particular attributes, relations, actions, and representations.

This is also what the present conference seeks to explore. The contributions gathered here move across periods, regions, genres, and types of evidence – from antiquity and the medieval world to modern and contemporary contexts, from archival and epigraphic traces to literature, material culture, institutional memory, and digital data. Some begin with individuals, others with families, clans, institutions, or networks; some encounter persons in historical records, others in literary and legendary narratives; still others ask how identities and relationships can be represented, modelled, connected, and visualised through digital technologies. What they share is an interest in the many ways in which persons become historically legible, and in what can be learned when individual traces are placed in relation to one another. In this sense, the breadth of approaches, texts, and technologies represented here is not incidental to prosopography but characteristic of its potential: to move from persons to relations, and from relations towards a richer understanding of the historical worlds they inhabited.

The conference will be held in English.

Program booklet.

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, 23 September 2026

PRE-EVENT

Gosposka Hall at ZM GIAM ZRC SAZU, Gosposka ulica 16, Ljubljana 

18.00–19.00 Guest lecture

* Sandra Rebok: Friends or Foes? Spain and the American Revolution

(co-hosted by the Embassy of Spain)

Thursday, 24 September 2026

DAY 1

Atrium ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana

9.00–9.30 Registration & Coffee 

9.30–9.50 Welcome speeches

* Mija Oter Gorenčič, Chair of the ZRC SAZU Scientific Council

* Gregor Pobežin, ZRC SAZU, Head of the Institute of Cultural History

9.50–10.30 Methodological Approaches to Prosopography 1

* Francesca Luigia Massaro: On the Trail of Returns. For a Study of Veterans in the Long Post-War Period in Italy (1945–1960): Potentiality and Challenges

* Valentina Janković Barbarić: Nobility as Patrons and Consumers of Cultural Goods: Insights from Family Archival Records

10.30–10.45 Discussion

10.45–11.10 Coffee break

11.10–12.10 Between Art and Lived Experience

* Alina Dana Weber: Prosopography and Fiction: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924)

* Sara Gumina: From Embroidery to Lived Space: Experience and Prosopographical Construction in Chiara Villani’s “Peasant Wunderkammer”

* Selma Haciosmanoglu: From Individuals to Networks: A Prosopographical Reconstruction of Children’s Musical Culture in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic, 1876–1946

12.10–12.30 Discussion

12.30–14.00 Lunch break

14.00–15.00 Digital Prosopography: Databases, Linked Open Data, Semantic Modelling, Visualisation

* Matthias Schlögl: Bridging Prosopographical Research Through Pragmatic Digital Integration – The Prosopographical Research Platform Austria (PFP)

* Eleni Makrygiorgou: Modelling the Friction of Identity: A Semantic Analysis of Inquisition and Material Culture in Sixteenth-Century Venice

* Ahac Meden, Uroš Šmajdek: Defining Data Uncertainty in the PZSBL

15.00–15.30 Discussion with coffee break

15.30–15.50 AGRFT 80

* Simona Ješelnik, Ana Jerman Obreza, Miha Grum, Matej Tomažin: The Online Exhibition AGRFT 80 

17.00–18.30 Roundtable: Lives of collections

Friday, 25 September 2026

DAY 2

Atrium ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 2, Ljubljana

8.40–9.10 Registration & Coffee

9.10–9.30 Methodological Approaches to Prosopography 2

* Ivan Dimitrijević: The Concept of the Clan: Between the Person and the Society

9.30–10.30 Greco-Roman Antiquity

* Karol Zielinski: The Homeric Changes to the Traditional Image of Odysseus

* Rok Ribič: “Acerrimus belli concitator”: A Prosopographical Study of Antonius Primus’ Military Network in 69 AD

* Gregor Pobežin: Scipio’s Cronies: A Prosopographical Attempt at (Re-)Constructing the Numantine Connection

10.30–10.50 Discussion with coffee break

10.50–11.30 Medieval Worlds 1

* Vytas Jankauskas: Prosopography and the Study of Legendary Narrative (The Case of the Lithuanian Chronicles)

* Mija Oter Gorenčič: Mapping the Networks of the Counts of Cilli: A Prosopographical Approach

11.30–11.50 Discussion with coffee break

11.50–12.30 Medieval Worlds 2

* Peter Štoka: Institutional Memory and Social Networks in the Benedictine Cartulary of St Nicholas of Oltra (1072–1569)

* Neža Zajc: The Hagiography and Hagiographers as the Precursor of the Cultural-Historical Value of the Sanctity’s Virtue

12.30–12.40 Discussion

12.40–14.00 Lunch break

14.00–15.00 (Early) Modern Contexts

* Ines Sabotič, Veronika Novoselac: The Collector’s Canon: Ivan Ulčnik and Amateur Prosopography in Zagreb (1934–1955)

* Matej Hriberšek: The Historical Chronicle Bosnia Seraphica by Fr. Maurus Fajdiga as a Prosopographic Source

* Veljko Stanić: Edvard Kocbek and the Magazine Esprit: Anatomy of an Encounter

15.00–15.20 Discussion

15.20–15.30 Final remarks

Special (technical) session

(available at https://prosopography.zrc-sazu.si/en/)

* Shalala Bagirova: Erik Biering: From Entrepreneurship to Diplomacy / panel (Early) Modern Contexts

* Khatira Hajiyeva: A Prosopographical Analysis of the European Union’s Special Representatives in the South Caucasus: An International Historical Perspective (2003–2026) / panel Methodological Approaches to Prosopography

* Aykhan Mehdizade: Digital Analysis of the 1897 Imperial Census: Educational Patterns in the Governorates of Elisavetpol and Baku / panel Digital Prosopography: Databases, Linked Open Data, Semantic Modelling, Visualisation

Organised by the Institute of Cultural History ZRC SAZU, this conference is funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS) within the research programme The (New) Cultural History of Intellectual Heritage: Slovenian Historical Space in Its European Context (P6-0440).