Goal and Guiding Questions
While ethnicity and unfreedom have in recent years received considerable attention by historians working on premodern Europe and the Middle East, these two topics are only rarely explored together despite their obvious interconnections. The proposed workshop brings together historians of Europe and Middle East who work on the period of ca. 800–1500 CE and share an interest in questions of ethnicity and/or various forms of unfreedom, including, but not limited to slavery and serfdom. The goal of the workshop is to use the methods of transregional comparison and entanglement analysis to identify similarities, differences, and interconnections between norms, concepts, and practices of unfreedom and ethnicity in Europe and Middle East. To do so, the participants are invited to reflect in their contributions on one or several of the following guiding questions based on their respective regional expertise:
- How were legal, social, and religious norms, concepts, and practices of unfreedom constructed, expressed, and applied regarding specific ethnic groups?
- Which roles did concepts of unfreedom play in the construction, application, and performance of ethnic identities?
- How were the semantics of unfreedom and ethnicity interconnected?
- Were specific ethnic groups considered to be better suited for unfreedom (or freedom) than others and if so, were specific ethnic identities linked to particular forms of unfreedom (e.g., military slavery vs. domestic slavery)?
- How did ethnicity impact processes of the acquisition, transfer, and change of status of unfree people, and how were ethnic identities constructed, expressed, performed, and transformed during these processes?
If you are interested in presenting a paper at the conference, please send an abstract to one of the two organisers by 12 May.

Practicalities
The workshop will take place on March 28–29, 2025 at Freie Universität Berlin. A total of no more than 12 speakers will be invited. The organizers will cover the travel and accommodation costs of those invited speakers who do not have sufficient travel funds at their disposal. A decision whether and in what form the proceedings of the workshop will be published will be taken together by the participants and the organizers at the end of the workshop.