The conference Between Eagles and Dragons: Identity Negotiation and Ethnic Diversity in the Ancient World explores the processes through which ethnic identities were constructed, contested, and transformed across multi-ethnic societies of ancient Eurasia. Bringing into dialogue regions from the Mediterranean to India and China, the event aims to investigate how institutions, cultural practices, languages, and historical narratives shaped categories of belonging and otherness. By adopting a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, the conference seeks to highlight the fluid, dynamic, and historically contingent nature of identity formation in the ancient world. 

Argument

Ethnic diversity was a fundamental aspect of the ancient world, where the presence, migration, and interaction of peoples characterised by distinct ethnic identities shaped societies from West to East. These interactions frequently resulted in coexistence, hybridisation, resistance, inclusion, as well as exclusion, depending on shifting social, political and cultural conditions. Contact between different habits and customs, as well as the exchanges among various codes of values and linguistic systems, gave rise to a new identitarian consciousness.

This conference examines the dynamics of identity negotiation in multi-ethnic contexts across ancient Eurasian societies, including – but not limited to – those of Egypt, the Greco-Roman world, the Germanic frontier, India, and China. It aims to investigate how societies created, imposed, contested, or modified categories of belonging and otherness, considered not as reflections of a single cultural model but as historically situated and unstable constructions.

This conference departs from traditional approaches that treat these worlds as separate historical universes. Instead, we examine how parallel and interconnected processes of ethnic identity negotiation operated across Eurasian societies. By bringing these contexts into dialogue, we ask: Do imperial systems (Roman, Chinese) deploy similar discourses of 'barbarism', and how do their chroniclers encode or question such categories? How do colonial contexts reproduce, challenge, or generate alternative models of multiethnicity?

These questions frame our investigation into how normative frameworks, religious customs, political institutions, myths, memories, historiographies, and genealogies shaped — and were contested by — diverse communities across ancient Eurasia.

Through the observation of case studies from various languages, regions, and disciplines, the conference aims to shed light on the complex, often unstable processes through which identities were forged in antiquity, whether under the shadow of Western Eagles or Eastern Dragons, symbols of imperial authority across both ends of the ancient world.

Thematic Axes

Below is a list of potential thematic axes to explore during the conference, while remaining open to further developments:

1. Contested Boundaries and Institutional Exclusion

How did normative frameworks of citizenship construct and police ethnic boundaries? What mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion did institutions deploy, and how were these boundaries transgressed, renegotiated, or destabilised by subordinated groups and borderline figures?

2. Margins and Minorities: Foreigners, Stigma, and Social Exclusion

What strategies of containment, tolerance, or assimilation were deployed by dominant groups, and how did marginalised communities resist, subvert, or strategically conform to these frameworks?

3. Politics of Memory and Genealogies: Competing Narratives of the Past

How did different communities and social groups within multi-ethnic societies construct competing, contradictory narratives of their past? How did colonised, enslaved, or subordinated populations contest and rewrite ethnic mythologies? What silences and erasures characterised ancient historiography’s treatment of non-dominant groups?

4. Entangled Worlds: Cultural Exchange and Hybrid Identities

What new forms of linguistic, religious, legal, or symbolic expression emerged from contact zones between East and West, between established powers and emerging identities? How did multilingualism, code-switching, and linguistic hybridity shape new forms of ethnic consciousness? How did communities navigate competing systems of communication and meaning-making?

5. Transgressing Hierarchies: How Foreign and Marginal Elites Negotiated Power

How did individuals and groups marked as ‘foreign’ or ‘barbarian’ navigate, appropriate, and contest structures of power? How did they renegotiate their ethnic identity through access to authority, and how did established elites respond to this mobility? What limits and precarity characterised the power of foreign-origin elites?

Disciplinary Fields and Interpretive Approaches

The conference will focus primarily on the following fields, while remaining open to other approaches: Greek and Roman history; Greek and Latin language and literature; Classical philology and Byzantine philology; Egyptology and Coptic civilisation; Germanic philology; History, religions, and philosophies of South and Central Asia; Indology and Tibetology, Languages and literatures of China and Southeast Asia.

The conference explicitly moves beyond all binary oppositions – “center/periphery, "civilised/uncivilised,” “insiders/outsiders,” “male/female” – to explore the fluidity and constant renegotiation of ethnic, cultural, political, and gendered boundaries in ancient Eurasia.

Date and Venue of the Conference

The conference will take place from 17 to 19 September 2026 at the Department of Literature, Languages and Cultural Heritage of the University of Cagliari (Campus Sa Duchessa, Via Is Mirrionis 1, 09123 Cagliari, Italy).

Selected speakers are expected to present in person, while participation via remote connection will be allowed only under exceptional circumstances, to be indicated at the time of proposal submission. The audience will also be able to follow the sessions online via MS Teams.

Submission of Proposals

Proposals are invited from researchers at all career stages, with special encouragement for early-career scholars, including PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. Contribution proposals should be sent to between.eagles.and.dragons@gmail.com by 31st March 2026.

The file (in .pdf format) should include an anonymous abstract of no more than 500 words and a reference bibliography.

A brief biographical note, accompanied by the title of the proposal, should be submitted in a separate file. Each paper (in Italian or English) should last 20 minutes.

The Scientific Committee will evaluate the proposals and announce the selection by the end of April.

Contributions will be published, subject to double-blind peer review.

Scientific Committee

• Antonio Maria Corda (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Filippo Costantini (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Donato De Gianni (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Silvia Einaudi (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Piergiorgio Floris (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Francesca Piccioni (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Antonio Piras (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Elisabetta Poddighe (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Enrico Emanuele Prodi (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Felice Stama (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Veronka Szöke (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Tiziana Pontillo (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)

Organising Committee

• Francesca Cau (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Morena Deriu (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)
• Alessandro Giudice (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
• Giorgia Oggiano (Università di Cagliari / University of Cagliari)