The PAIXUE Team

Niels Gaul co-directs, together with Curie Virág, the PAIXUE project. His research focuses on the middle and later Byzantine empire; his recent work has looked at various types of social performances – be it in the form of rhetorical ‘theatre’ or (staged) miracles –, at the scholarly networks permeating Byzantine society and at the so-called ‘classical tradition’ from the ninth through fourteenth centuries. As part of the PAIXUE project, he is writing a monograph provisionally entitled Classicising Learning in Byzantium and co-authoring articles with Curie Virág and a visiting sinologist yet to be appointed.

Curie Virág is co-director of the PAIXUE project with Niels Gaul, and a specialist in pre-Qin and Tang-Song thought and intellectual history. She is interested in the evolution of ethical and cognitive norms and practices, and how this history is bound up with broader conceptual and structural developments. In the PAIXUE project, she is writing up a monograph that continues her long-standing investigation of emotions into the Middle Period, situating them within the context of new forms of subjectivity and learning practices that emerged alongside the shifting contours of empire. She is also co-authoring, with Niels Gaul, a methodological article on comparative approaches to classicizing learning in Byzantium and Tang-Song China, and with Foteini Spingou, a comparative research article on pleasure and the authorial self.

Defangyu is a research associate on the PAIXUE team. He focuses on the performative situations and instances of classicising learning in Tang and Song China. Defangyu is a second year PhD student supervised by Prof. Niels Gaul, Dr Yannis Stouraitis and Prof. Michael Höckelmann. His doctoral research is a comparative study on female rule/regency and literati elites in the Tang-Song China and the middle Byzantine period, with particular focus on the role of literati and classicising learning with regard to these rules. There are three main strands within his research. First, the research aims to discover how female rulers built up the legitimacy of their reigns within a conservative and patriarchal society. Second, the research examines how the Byzantine and Chinese literati, whose ideologies were considerably shaped by classicising learning, considered the legitimacy of female rulership and how these considerations affected their interactions and relationships with the female monarchs. Finally, the research traces the evolution of the literati’s evaluations and descriptions of female rulership over time.

Bilal is a research associate on the PAIXUE team, focusing on the literary performances of Middle Byzantine literati in the ninth and tenth centuries. Bilal is a fourth-year PhD student supervised by Prof. Niels Gaul, Dr Yannis Stouraitis and Dr Curie Virág His doctoral project studies patterns of resistance and subversion in the middle Byzantine empire with a specific focus on a relatively understudied ninth-/tenth-century literatus, Niketas David Paphlagon. Bilal’s research consists of three parts. Firstly, it systematically analyzes resistance to imperial power not coming from major shareholders in the empire but from middling class figures within a comparative framework that draws analogies between Niketas’ resistance to imperial and ecclesiastical power on religious grounds and the similar antagonistic contexts from earlier and later periods. Secondly, his research traces the impact of Niketas’ historiographical project, the so-called Sacred History, on ninth- and tenth-century historiography that was shaped under the Macedonian dynastic ideology as well as investigates his other writings. Lastly, the research focuses on career trajectories from provinces to Constantinople from the ninth through eleventh centuries.