by The Margins to the Centre 2025 Organising Team The Margins to Centre Conference 2025 was an undergraduate-organised conference which took place on the 24th of April 2025 at the University of York. This conference was organised with the primary goal being to provide an academic space to aid in amplifying the voices of marginalised communities throughout history. In addition to this, the conference aspired to enrich the field of historical studies by creating an inclusive, reflective, and interdisciplinary space for academics, students and scholars through curating discussions that bridge traditional scholarship with fresh perspectives. In doing so, we aimed to highlight the contributions of marginalised groups and to critique the lasting influence of dominant narratives and cultural memory which dominate countless academic fields. The conference was organised around the focal theme of ‘Belonging’. Our organising committee opted to split the conference into four main segments, each of which engaged with significant issues or topics related to the field of historical studies which we felt connected back to our theme of ‘Belonging’. The segments were as follows: Gender and Identity in Historical Perspectives, Marginalisation and Power: Dynamics of Exclusion and Resistance, Reassessing Marginalised and Underutilised Sources, and Colonialism and the […]

by Dr Mariana Bodnaruk (Masaryk University Brno), Dr Stephan Bruhn (German Historical Institute London), and Dr Michael Eber (University of Cologne) On 22–23 May, the German Historical Institute in London hosted a conference titled ‘Trans Sainthood in Translation, ca. 400–1500’. Seventeen presenters from eight countries covered the translations and artistic depictions of the lives of the so-called monachoparthenoi. According to their legends, these saints were assigned female gender at birth but lived as monks in male monasteries. While most of their vitae originated in the Greek-speaking regions of the Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean, versions of their stories appear to have circulated in almost every Late Antique and Medieval Christian community. The conference focused on the five monachoparthenoi who received full-length biographies in both Greek and Latin (Eugenia*us, Euphrosyne*Smaragdus, Marina*us, Pelagia*us and Theodora*us), but papers also covered these vitae as they appear in Syriac, Coptic, Ge’ez, Church Slavonic, Old English, Old French, Middle High German and Old Norse. Visual depictions and relics from Constantinople, Cyprus, Palestine, the Balkans, Rome and Iberia were also explored (the programme is available here). Although the stories were literary constructions written mainly by monastic authors, they had an original historical core and a long oral tradition. […]