Decadence: Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Decline from Ancient Empire to the Age of Polycrisis

Conference open to scholars of all stages

Venue: British School at Rome, Rome

Dates:21-22nd January 2027

Following a successful symposium in 2025 on the subject of civilisational origins, we are delighted to announce our next event, Decadence, a conference about what happens to civilisations, societies, and cultural movements when they reach and then exceed their peak.

Our first event investigated the topos of civilizational origin, and here we turn instead to decadence – that moment when ideas, cultures, political structures, artistic movements and forms, and technologies, overreach their greatest heights. What factors lead to civilisational stagnation and collapse? What does it mean when our largest ideas succeed too well?

We invite scholars whose work spans all periods and disciplines, from classics, archaeology, history, and history of art, to literature, theology, modern languages, science, communication and technology, interested in trajectories of decline and fall and how different eras, places, people, and disciplines imagine and figure the phenomenon of decadence.

The event responds to contemporary anxieties surrounding Artificial Intelligence and its repercussions for the future of human verbal competence, education and the political commons. In public discourse, the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence has raised the spectre of decadence and catastrophe on a civilisational scale, with fears that machine learning will come to replace organic knowledge and eloquence, threatening people’s ability to learn, understand and be creative with language.

We are honoured and excited to host the event at the British School at Rome both because of the city’s symbolic importance within narratives of decadence but also because of the BSR’s exceptional library, archive, and community. During the event it is our intent to promote active on-site use of the school’s distinctive holdings, which encompass one of the world’s richest classical research libraries as well as unparalleled collections of rare antiquarian and archaeological materials, grand tour literature, and early art photography of Roman landscapes and monuments. The conference will include time for participants to engage with these materials and to discuss them together, and we very much look forward to welcoming you there in January 2027.

We welcome submissions from any field of study and from scholars of all stages, and we seek to put together multidisciplinary panels to allow conversations to flourish across traditional disciplinary borders. This approach has been a hallmark of our events since 2024, and we’re excited to welcome friends old and new to participate in our open-ended dialogue as we ask what happens when success elides into excess and rise turns into fall.

We invite 20-minute papers on the intellectual history, aesthetics, literature, culture, mythology, theology and science of civilisational ‘decadence’ in any period or location. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

v  The attributes of ‘decadent’ style from classical rhetoric to modern literature.

v  Tropes of civilisational decay and their mobilisation across cultural contexts.

v  The role of spoken eloquence in historical narratives of rise and fall.

v  Representations of decadence in art history.

v  Perspectives on artificial intelligence from the histories of rhetoric, media, communication and technology.

v  Non-European perspectives on decadence.

Abstracts of up to 250 words to be submitted via this Google form by 15th September 2026:

https://forms.gle/HpkSBv8dixLBivu46

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 20th September 2026. If you need an earlier notification to gain funding, please just reach out to us and we will do all we can to assist, we really want to make this event as accessible and welcoming as possible.

Please do not hesitate to send any questions to Dr. Emma Wilson, representative of the organising committee, at emmaemma@txstate.edu.

This event is presented by Ramus International, a new interdisciplinary scholarly collaboratory for the study of the history of eloquence (https://www.ramusinternational.org/).