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Byzantine Childhood
By: Oana-Maria Cojocaru
Video Interview
Oana-Maria Cojocaru discusses her book, Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society, with Reidar Aasgaard. Watch here on the SHCY Youtube Channel, or listen to the conversation as a podcast. Other episodes of the SHCY podcast are available at our podcast website, or you can subscribe on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
Oana-Maria Cojocaru is a postdoctoral researcher at the Tampere Institute for Advanced Studies. Reidar Aasgaard is Professor of the History of Ideas in the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas at the University of Oslo.
About Oana-Maria Cojocaru
Oana-Maria Cojocaru (PhD. University of Oslo, 2016) is a historian specialized in Medieval Byzantine society. Her research interests are primarily on historical childhood, youth, disability, and emotions with a particular focus on everyday life experiences. She is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Tampere Institute for Advanced Studies, where she is studying the performative practice of hope within family context. She explores how the Byzantine families who experienced various tragic events such as children’s death constructed and maintained the sense of hope and managed to go on with their lives and still found ways to plan the future and cope with these harsh realities. After obtaining her PhD in Oslo she has also explored topics ranging from adolescent behaviour and sexuality to experiences of disability and childhood in medieval Byzantium. She has co-edited the volume Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Routledge 2018), which examines ideas about children and childhood in ancient and medieval societies. Her recent monograph, Byzantine Childhood: Representations and Experiences of Children in Middle Byzantine Society (Routledge 2021) explores the intricacies of growing up in medieval Byzantium and children’s everyday experiences and their agency in various contexts.
This post is part of the SHCY Featured Books series, which provides conversations about important contributions to the history of childhood and youth.