The Center for Global Antiquity proudly presents a lecture by Professor Xin Wen (Princeton University), An Envoy State: Turfan and the Integration of Late Antique Eurasia.

In our understanding of medieval trans-Eurasian connections, large political entities such as the Byzantine empire and the Tang empire are often seen as the main upholders and drivers. But even at the heights of their powers, these empires did not have control over the entirety of Eurasia. So who was maintaining trans-Eurasian connections in the absence of—and in the spaces between—empires in the medieval time? In this lecture, I examine the case of the Central Asian kingdom of Turfan from the fifth to the seventh century. The history of this kingdom during this period is known to us thanks to its medieval residents’ peculiar practice of clothing the dead bodies with used papers, including government documents, and its arid climate that helped preserve these documents. From them, we can see that an extraordinary number of travelers from Byzantine, India, China, and the Steppe world converged in Turfan, not typically as their destinations, but as a stop to other large states. In response, the kingdom of Turfan devoted outsized resources both material and human to the receiving, accommodating, and protecting these travelers. In this way, Turfan fashioned itself into what I call an “envoy state,” a state whose administrative functions disproportionately served travelers from other, larger states. States like Turfan, I argue, was indispensable in the maintenance of long-distance connections in and the cultural and political integration of Eurasia in the medieval time.

This lecture is an installment of Past Forward: Engaging with Deep Time in the 21st Century, a series of lectures and workshops funded by the Charles K. Colver Lectureships & Publications Fund.

Dr. Eva Miller is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL History. She is a cultural historian with an interest in public art, museums and exhibitions, and popular understandings of the deep past.

Her postdoctoral project explored the ancient Middle East, the modern West, and the relationship between the two, through asking questions about processes of rediscovery, transmission, and reception. She is interested in the wider intellectual climates that shaped and were shaped by the rediscovery of ‘new pasts’ from Egypt and Iraq, and how they wound up being used, by different groups and in different ways, to work out what it meant to be modern. She has explored how these pasts became part of a self-justifying teleological narrative of a ‘rise of civilization’, and a transfer from East to West, in her book, Early Civilization and the American Modern: Images of Middle Eastern Origins in the United States, 1893–1939 (UCL Press 2024). Her edited volume Finding Antiquity, Making the Modern Middle East: Archaeology, Empires, Nations (with Guillemette Crouzet, Bloomsbury 2025) considered how antiquity(/ies) and archaeology were mobilised by European and Middle Eastern imperial and national powers, and ordinary dealers, writers, and administrators on the ground.

Increasingly, her research focuses on larger questions about interpreting the past, and the significance of ‘origins’ and ‘firsts’ in museums and public culture. Among other areas, she has worked on self-Orientalising German Jewish art, cryptozoological investigations of living dinosaurs attested in ancient Babylonian artefacts, anthropological theories of the evolution of languages and writing, modernist theories about the ziggurat as the ideal skyscraper, and the role of art in science museums.

Eva’s background is in the art, history, and languages of ancient Mesopotamia. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford where her thesis investigated representations of enemy punishment in palace art and Akkadian cuneiform texts of the 7th century BCE Assyrian monarch Ashurbanipal. She has previously been a teaching fellow for the ancient Middle East at UCL History, a teaching fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Henri Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute.

Applications are now open for the CGA Spring 2026 Funding & Grant Round. During this round, we encourage faculty, graduate students and post-docs focused on the study of pre-modern cultures and societies through any academic discipline to submit event proposals for the 2026/2027 academic year.

Graduate students and post-docs are also encouraged to apply for CGA top up funding for Spring & Summer 2026, and graduate students are also encouraged to submit proposals for student-led groups. Please note that graduate student applications require the support of a faculty member (graduate students should complete the application form first, leaving plenty of time to forward it on to a faculty supporter to complete their letter of recommendation).

Please also note that you are required to be affiliated with CGA to apply for funding. If you are interested in affiliating, you may do so by submitting this form.

All application materials must be received by 5pm on Monday, March 16, 2026.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

Global/Antiquity: a pair of panel discussions to mark the launch of Brown’s Center for Global Antiquity.

What is Global Antiquity? What does it mean to you, and what does it mean at Brown? Two panels, one on the theme “antiquity” and one on the theme “global”, will continue the ongoing conversation about how we can come together to study the distant past across times, places, and disciplines. Panelists from a variety of departments will reflect on what these terms mean in their own research, followed by open discussion. All Brown faculty and graduate students are welcome, and anyone who wants to contribute to the ongoing work of defining the CGA’s scope, methods, and ambitions should be there!

Antiquity

What are the stakes of defining the distant past as “antiquity”? When does antiquity begin and end? Are its limits and definitions the same in different places, or for different disciplines? What do researchers of these periods share, and what distinguishes them from others in their field working in more recent time?

The March 9th panelists are Professors Steve Houston (Anthropology), Matthew Rutz (Egyptology and Assyriology) & Amy Russell (Classics, History). 

Reception to follow. 

Our faculty panel (Jana Mokrisova, Matthew Rutz) will talk through and take questions on the stages of an academic job search. If you’re thinking of going on the market next year, this is for you - and come along even if you are earlier in your graduate career or aren’t sure about pursuing an academic job, to get a sense of what awaits and connect with other students in the same position. Open to all graduate students with an interest in the ancient world.

Refreshments served!

The DigDUG (Archaeology Department Undergraduate Group) invites ALL STUDENTS to stop by Rhode Island Hall on February 24th between 2:30 and 3:30pm. Relax on some comfy couches and enjoy a study break with tea, coffee, and some snacks. Everyone welcome! If you’ve ever taken (or even considered taking) an ARCH course or are interested in the ancient world, come say hi!

Please join us for a discussion of how to apply for research funding, within and beyond Brown. Professors Michael Satlow (Judaic Studies & Religious Studies) and Shanti Morell-Hart (Anthropology & JIAAW) will facilitate the discussion. There will also be an opportunity to talk to the CGA director about any plans you might have to apply to our own grants, either this time round (the deadline will be March 16) or in the future. All graduate students with an interest in the distant past are welcome.

Free lunch will be provided! 

The DigDUG (Archaeology Department Undergraduate Group) invites ALL STUDENTS to stop by Rhode Island Hall on February 10th between 2:30 and 3:30pm. Relax on some comfy couches and enjoy a study break with tea, coffee, and some snacks. Everyone welcome! If you’ve ever taken (or even considered taking) an ARCH course or are interested in the ancient world, come say hi!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email Global_Antiquity@brown.edu.

CGA invites all graduate students interested in the ancient world to join us for our December Grad Forum: “Alt-Ac Careers”. We’ll be talking about alt-ac or para-academic careers: job opportunities in academia and related sectors other than becoming a professor. What opportunities are there, and how can you set yourself up for success? There will also be room to discuss non-academic career paths more broadly. We will be joined by two Brown colleagues who use their PhDs in ancient studies in different branches of academia: Sam Caldis (Associate Dean of the Faculty, 2019 PhD in Ancient History) and Micah Saxton (Humanities Librarian, 2013 PhD in Religious Studies). 

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

Join us for an evening of drinks, light bites, archaeology, and ancient cultures.

Sponsored by Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, Department of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

This workshop will focus on Nubian rites at the Egyptian temple of Philae, located at Egypt’s traditional southern border, gateway to Nubia. The temple was a site shared by Egyptians, Nubians, Greek pilgrims and residents in Egypt, and Roman soldiers in the third century CE. During about 100 years, Nubian priests traveled to Philae to perform rites for Osiris, god of the underworld. They poured milk libations meant to resurrect the god. I will share a short article for participants to read beforehand, present a brief PowerPoint on the topic, and then open the floor to conversation about Nubian ritual practice, Meroitic royal involvement in the temple of Philae, and the prayers engraved into the temple’s stone walls in Egyptian Demotic, Greek, and Meroitic that give us insight into these unique ritual practices that find echoes in royal burials at Meroe, hundreds of miles to the south.

Registration is gently encouraged, but not required. 

This lecture considers the powerful sole-ruling queens of the ancient kingdom of
Meroe, Egypt’s southern neighbor in the land now called Nubia (300 BCE-300
CE). These women portrayed themselves as powerful rulers, warriors, and as
officiants in rites performed for the gods. They were also voluptuous and
frequently depicted bare-breasted. Both of these factors have caused distress to
Egyptologists who discuss them, often evoking expressions of disgust and fat
phobia. Using Sabrina Strings’ 2019 monograph Fearing the Black Body: The
Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, I will trace the development of a European racial
hierarchy during the time of the early period of Egyptology. Echoes of those
racialized concepts remain unexamined in Egyptology and are unconsciously
expressed when discussing the queens of Meroe.

Join the Brown Late Antique Group (BLAG) for a graduate student-led primary source workshop on November 13th from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm in the Wilbour Hall Seminar Room. We will read and discuss a selection of primary sources, both in translation and in their original languages (Syriac, Latin). The workshop will be led by Paul Aste, PhD Candidate in History, and Patryk Imielski, PhD Student in Religious Studies, who will present these sources and how they relate to their current research projects.

Graduate students and faculty are welcome!

Please email bailey_freeburn@brown.edu to receive pre-circulated primary sources.

The Department of Egyptology and Assyriology is pleased to present: The Abraham Sachs Lecture in Assyriology: “Doing and Undoing Gender in Babylon, ca. 1800 BCE” with Jana Matuszak, Assistant Professor of Sumerology at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, The University of Chicago. Wednesday, November 12th, 2025, 5:30 p.m., 280 Brook St. (Stephen Robert Hall), Room 101 (True North).

About the Sachs Lecture Series:

Join other graduate students across Brown as we all work on our own writing assignments - together. This can range from a weekly response post for seminars, to a dissertation chapter. Snacks and coffee will be provided by the Center for Global Antiquity. Sessions will include one silent hour and one social hour to accommodate different work styles and provide a chance to meet graduate students across the various departments connected to the Center for Global Antiquity.

CGA invites all graduate students interested in global antiquity to join us for our next Grad Forum: “How to Make the Most of a Conference”. Professors John Steele (E&A) and Susan Harvey (Religious Studies) will serve as panelists for this session.

Should you be attending conferences? Should you be speaking at conferences? When, and how? And how do you make the most of it once you’re there? This informal workshop is for all graduate students whose research relates to the ancient world. No registration required.

The first discoveries of tattoos on ancient Egyptian human remains date back over a century, but Egyptologists had only identified tattoos on a few individuals spanning Pharaonic Egypt’s more than 3,000 year history. Textual evidence is virtually silent on the practice and depictions of tattoos are often ambiguous. Over the past decade, however, new technology, reduced stigma, and growing scholarly interest have dramatically changed our evidence for and understanding of tattooing.

This includes my work with the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale (IFAO), where we made an incredible discovery—an extensively tattooed woman from the necropolis at Deir el-Medina, the community of the workmen who cut and decorated the New Kingdom’s royal tombs. With over 30 tattoos, this woman completely redefined what we knew about tattooing in ancient Egypt. Since then, we have identified several other tattooed people at the site and new evidence for the practice of tattooing in ancient Nubia. Research by Renée Friedman and experimental archaeology on possible tattoo tools have also filled in large gaps on the practice. Including these recent discoveries, we now have evidence for over 50 tattooed people from the Nile Valley.

This lecture will share the stories of these tattooed people and the remarkable legacy of tattoo practices they represent—a tradition that began over 5,000 years ago and continues today.

Join us for this opportunity for graduate students working in antiquities across departments to meet, connect and learn more about the Center for Global Antiquity. 

Lorenzo Castellano, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present his research in an informal lecture titled, “Palaeobotanical Approaches to Farming in Ancient Anatolia:Twelve Millennia of Agriculture in Two Centuries of Research.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Free, open to the public. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact globalbrown@brown.edu

Light Lunch fare will be provided for attendees and will be available starting at 11:45am.

This lecture explores the development of alchemical theory and practice across distinct but interconnected regions—Graeco-Roman Egypt, Byzantium, and the Near East—from antiquity to the early Islamic period. By combining close textual analysis with experimental reconstructions of ancient alchemical procedures, it aims to illuminate the material practices behind the texts. Drawing on a series of laboratory experiments informed by historical and philological research, the lecture will reconstruct how ancient alchemists worked and offer fresh interpretations of the texts and literary forms through which their knowledge was transmitted. In doing so, it presents a comprehensive, longue durée perspective on the evolution of alchemy, revealing it as a dynamic and diverse art shaped by multiple technical and intellectual traditions.

About the Speaker

Matteo Martelli is professor in History of Science at the University of Bologna, where he teaches history of ancient science and technology along with history of ancient medicine. His research focuses on Graeco-Roman and Byzantine science – with particular attention to alchemy and medicine (pharmacology) – and its reception in the Syro-Arabic tradition. His publications include The Four Books of Pseudo-Democritus (2014) and Collecting Recipes. Byzantine and Jewish Pharmacology in Dialogue (2017; edited with L. Lehmhaus). In the framework of the AlchemEast project is currently working on a critical edition and translation of the alchemical books by Zosimus of Panopolis as they are preserved in the Syriac tradition.

About the Brown-University of Bologna Lecture Series

Founded in 2017 to commemorate Brown’s long-standing partnership with the University of Bologna, which now marks 45 years, the Brown-Bologna Lecture Series celebrates the enduring collaboration between our institutions in advancing innovative research, impactful teaching and learning, and immersive cultural exchange.

In 2024, DSI awarded nine seed grants to data science researchers in a range of disciplines at Brown:

• Towards Explainable ML Modeling for Multi-modal Remote Sensing Data
  • David Laidlaw, James Tompkin, Ziang Liu (CS), James Kellner (EEOB), Matthew Harrison (DAM)
• Climate and Human Health Connections in South Asia
  • Albert Larson (DEEPS), Ali Akanda (Civil & Environmental Engineering, URI)
• Staying positive: eliminating negative sample weights using optimal transport
  • Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Roloff (Physics)
• Ocean, Climate, and Ecosystems (OCE) Data Science Research Internship at Brown Unive r sity
  • Sarah Lummis, Emanuele DiLorenzo (DEEPS/IBES)
• Building a Prescriptive Analytics: Research Collaboration with the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority
  • Alice Paul (Biostats), Serdar Kadioglu (CS)
• North Burial Ground Documentation Project: Digitizing Providence’s Buried Past
  • Jordi Rivera-Prince, Blanca Payne (Anthropology), Annalisa Heppner (North Burial Ground)
• Mappy Python Diaries – Living Textbook Project
  • Seda Salap-Ayca (DEEPS/IBES)
• Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Data Science to Improve Community-Based and Public Health Initiatives in Rhode Island and Beyond
  • Jun Tao, Philip Chan (Medicine and Epidemiology), Ellie Pavlick (CS)
• The Digital Pyramid Texts Project: Democratizing Insights from Ancient Egypt
  • Nikos Vasilakis (CS), Christelle Alvarez (Egyptology), Michael Greenberg ’07 (CS, Stevens Institute of Technology)

Join DSI and the 2024 DSI Seed Grant Awardees for a poster session and lightning talks on their impactful data science research projects and what they’ve accomplished in the past year.

Light refreshments will be served.

Learn more about this year’s Data Science Seed Grant Projects.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

The students of ARCH 1630 Fighting Pharaohs: Ancient Egyptian Warfare, taught by Professor Laurel Bestock, will be staging a reenactment of the historic Battle of Kadesh on Brown University’s Quiet Green (Prospect Street, between George and Waterman Streets) this Thursday, April 17th, from 2:30-3:50pm!

The original Battle of Kadesh was fought between the Egyptians and the Hittites in the 13th century BC. It is believed to be the largest battle ever fought involving chariots (according to Wikipedia…)!

Brown University’s Battle of Kadesh 2025 is open to ALL members of the public, to watch, cheer on either side, or even participate in the battle.

For those who wish to participate on either side of the battle, there will be a practice run on Tuesday April 15th between 2:30-3:50pm.

Christie Carr, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Assyriology at Brown University, will present her research in an informal lecture titled, “Cuneiform Insights into the Dawn of the Anthropocene.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “What can I do this summer to prepare for the job market in the fall?”

Even at the best of times, an academic job search can be unpredictable–but advanced planning can help make things go a little smoother. Join Andrew Scherer (Anthropology, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World), Charles Carroll (Sheridan Center), and Gretel Rodriguez (History of Art and Architecture) as they discuss their thoughts and answer your questions about this very important topic!

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

Schedule of Events

9:30 Coffee and welcome

10:00 Introduction (Gretel Rodríguez and Meghan Rubenstein)

10:15 Laurel Bestock | “Seeing and Being Seen: Ancient Egyptian serdab Statues and their Contexts.”

In the Egyptian Old Kingdom (ca. 2650-2120 BCE) many elite tombs were provided with small rooms that scholars term “serdabs.” These rooms were above-ground parts of the tomb chapel and were designed to hold a statue or statues. They are characterized by their inaccessibility—once the statue was emplaced, the room was sealed, sometimes with a slit left through which the statue could see out, but never with any means for a visitor to the tomb to see in. The invisibility of the serdab statues was essential to their function, which was to receive offerings from visitors to the tomb and, it will be argued, to perpetuate social relationships that included an element of hierarchy across the boundary of death. What happens when such a statue is removed from its original context and displayed in a museum? This paper will address both how such statues allowed their original contexts to function and how different museums have chosen to engage with their visibility or invisibility in ways that engage seeing and power in today’s world.

11:00 David Kertai | “An Ornamental Monumentality: On the Interplay Between Architecture and Sculpture in Assyrian Royal Palaces.”

Assyrian palaces are best known for the sculptures that decorated the inner walls of their most monumental rooms. These sculptures are characterized by their large size, their overall shallow depth and the prominence given to inscribed texts. Four royal palaces decorated with sculptures have been excavated from Late Assyrian period (ca. 900-612 BCE). These provide a detailed view on the different sculptural programs. And yet much remains unclear about the roles these sculptures played in their architectural settings. This is partially due to a persistent Modernist focus on space, morphology, and typology to the detriment of the central role played by ornament in the Assyrian conception of architecture. Understanding the architecture of these palaces as forms of monumental ornamentation, this paper explores the central roles played by sculptures in providing meaning to the spaces they decorated and the sensorial experiences they might have evoked in individuals navigating the palaces.

11:45 Patricia Eunji Kim | “The Gallery of Shield-Portraits at the Delian Monument to Mithradates VI.”

In 102/101 BCE, the Athenian priest Helianax commissioned an unusual monument at Delos on behalf of the Pontic king Mithradates VI: a rectangular distyle in antis building was designed as a gallery of the king’s most important friends and generals. The monument boasted a total of thirteen shield-portraits (hopla). While each shield was carved into the surface of the masonry, the portrait busts were sculpted separately and then attached to or “hung” on those walls by iron pins. Inscriptions accompany each of the portraits, guiding the viewer with information about the person’s name, political role, and familial connections. The highly curated and particularly arranged display of honorific portraiture in a gallery of shields-as-art makes the Delian monument unique, prompting two questions for exploration. First, the spatial and sensory conditions that the building created demand analysis; how might we articulate the viewing experiences that the monument’s architecture and sculpture afforded? Second, the Hellenistic- period phenomenon of the shield-portrait is a distinctive category of representation that extended personhood—not only on the battlefield, but also in significant cultural and political arenas; what does the shield-portrait reveal about the aesthetic logics of weaponry in the ancient world?

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch break

2:00 Max Peers | “Buildings Set in Stone: Architecture and Sculpture from Living Bedrock on Punic-Roman Sardinia.”

This paper examines three structures from Punic-Roman Sardinia that blur the lines between sculpture, architecture, and geology in that each is partially carved from living bedrock. As such, the material and spatial characteristics of the different stages of construction—the quarrying, masonry, decoration, etc.—are collapsed into a single locus of activity and must be conceived of together, just as the ancient builders probably did. I examine the phases of, and individuals involved in, the construction of these structures through the lens of the chaîne opératoire, to understand who might have worked on the different elements of the structure, what skills they brought, and how they worked together with the stone in situ and made on site. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how the natural environment and local stone determined designs and building practices. The case studies I consider imbricate loci of work to a single location, which reveals a complex set of factors at play at these building sites, but I also argue that these conclusions concerning stone in states from raw and living to finished and installed, are applicable in other contexts in which local stone is being used for architecture and sculpture.

2:45 Meghan Rubenstein | “Monster Mouth Doorways and the Nature of Maya Architecture.”

Maya artists regularly collapsed boundaries separating the natural and supernatural realms, depicting rulers, ancestors, and deities together with sentient objects and zoomorphic beings. This paper explores how architectural sculpture reinforces that view of an animate and fluid world, looking specifically at the extraordinary, though perhaps misnamed, monster mouth doorways in the Yucatán peninsula. I propose these striking tooth-lined portals marked a point of transition between the natural and supernatural worlds, underscoring the ability of architecture to realize abstract concepts rooted in Maya ontology. This research, which analyzes iconography, materiality, and sensory-oriented design, also speaks to the phenomenological experience of monumental architecture during the Late Classic period (ca. 600-900 CE). The study of this subset of architectural sculpture elucidates the nature of Maya architecture, allowing us to better understand, from our modern perspective, the people who conceptualized, built, and used these monuments.

3:30 Nancy Steinhardt | “Architectural Sculpture in the Ancient World: the View from China.”

This paper seeks to define architectural sculpture in China before the year 1500 CE. It begins by confirming that relief sculpture has been standard on interior walls of tombs and interior and exterior rock-carved surfaces from the late centuries BCE and early CE centuries. The paper argues that, since those times, relief sculpture is interchangeable with wall painting as the primary means of narration, and that often an inscription is not necessary to understand what is represented. In Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian contexts the narration can be considered iconography, is inherently repetitive, and rarely experimental. With this background, we turn to five highly important types of Chinese architectural sculpture that, it will be proposed, have unique Chinese contexts: the gate-tower, with a focus on first- and second-century CE examples; exterior surfaces of Liao-dynasty (907-1125) monumental pagodas; eleventh- and twelfth-century examples of an interior, wooden wall technique known as xiaomuzuo (small-scale carpentry); marble door-pillows and related sculpture positioned only at the foot of a door; and two examples of miniature stages made at China’s premier porcelain kiln in Jingdezhen. In the conclusion, the paper seeks to determine if similar kinds of architectural sculpture existed in other parts of the Ancient World.

4:15-4:30 Coffee break

4:30 - 5:30 Response by Itohan Osayimwese / Group discussion

5:30 - 6:30 Reception

For more information, please visit our event website. 

Lynne M. Rouse is a landscape archaeologist who investigates the relationships between people, culture, and nature in ancient Central Asia. Dr. Rouse is currently the Volkswagen Fellow at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. She is also co-director of The Kimirek-Kum Archaeological Project in Uzbekistan, which was initiated in 2022 to investigate pre- and proto-historic land use in a now-dry ancient branch of the lower Zerafshan River, west of the modern city of Bukhara. 

Lynne Rouse received her Ph.D. from Washington University in 2015 after successfully defending her dissertation, titled “A Line in the Sand: Mobile Pastoralists, Sedentary Communities, and Local Production Systems in Bronze Age Turkmenistan”. Her work and research interests have centered around social and economic interactions across the Old World during the pivotal Bronze Age period, when cities, states, and complex inter-regional exchange networks emerged. Using a landscape approach to understanding the entanglement of social and natural factors in past societies, she investigates how choices made by local populations affect changes on regional scales. Most recently, she has been involved in projects in southern Jordan examining technology and production in marginal landscapes, and in directing a project in Turkmenistan looking at various aspects of interaction between pastoral and urban populations.

The Department of Egyptology and Assyriology is pleased to present the 2024-2025 Parker Lecture in Egyptology. Richard Bussmann, Professor of Egyptology at the Institute of African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne will give the 2024-2025 Parker Lecture lecture “Subaltern bodies in early Egypt” on Tuesday, April 1, at 5:30 p.m. in RI Hall 108.

About Richard Bussmann

Prof. Dr. Richard Bussmann studies ancient Egypt in its wider regional context from a combined archaeological, philological, and anthropological perspective. He is interested in comparative perspectives on ancient Egypt and in cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of the past and its heritage. In his book The archaeology of Pharaonic Egypt: society and culture, 2700-1700 BC (Cambridge University Press, 2023) he develops key themes in World Archaeology with evidence from ancient Egypt, including urbanism, interregional exchange in Northeast Africa and the Mediterranean, funerary culture, the archaeology of ritual, sacred kingship, archaic states, and realities beyond elites. He also conducts research on early writing and material practices of administration. Richard Bussmann directs the fieldwork project “Zawyet Sultan: Archaeology and heritage in Middle Egypt”. He is the president of the Verband der Ägyptologie and Secretary General of the International Association of Egyptologists.

About “Subaltern bodies in early Egypt”

The rise of the ancient Egyptian state was a catalyst for increasing social inequality on a previously unknown scale. Egyptology has made great advances in studying administration, royal ideology, and social structure from the predynastic period to the Old Kingdom (ca. 3,500 to 2,500 BC), but it is still difficult to understand how these phenomena were anchored in the daily lives of the wider population. This gap in research is partially due to a scarcity of preserved and recorded material, and it also raises questions on the level of theory and social modelling. My presentation explores to what extent subalternity can help with developing fresh interpretation. Subalternity means, briefly, studying the agency of marginalized groups. It has been much debated in history and post-colonial studies, but hardly in Egyptology. The focus of my presentation will be on the human body, a medium of communication that all human beings have, yet at different degrees of autonomy. The body has been a major object of study across the social and cultural sciences from the 1970s onwards, and since the 1990s also in archaeology and Egyptology. I argue that there is scope in Egyptology for reconciling written and visual data for the body with archaeology and physical anthropology. I will present fresh results from my current excavation in Zawyet Sultan (Middle Egypt) which have inspired my research.

About the Parker Lecture Series

The Parker Lecture is one of three lectures named after the founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs(Assyriology).

Born in 1905, Richard Parker graduated from Dartmouth College and earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1938. A 1947 bequest in Charles Edwin Wilbour’s name created Brown University’s Department of Egyptology and the Charles Edwin Wilbour Professorship, given to Richard Parker in 1948 at the recommendation of History of Mathematics Professor Otto Neugebauer. Accepting the job offer, Parker became the first Chair of the first Egyptology department in the United States. At the time of his acceptance, he was a founding trustee of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) and field director of the University of Chicago’s permanent expedition at Luxor in the Nile Valley. In Parker’s summation, Egyptologists fall into two categories: archeologists (who deal with physical artifacts) and philologists (who decode language). Parker identified himself as an epigrapher, a philologist who records ancient inscriptions. His contributions to the field include significant work in the areas of Egyptian language, astronomy, and chronology (conceptions of time). Parker wrote or collaborated on many books including the four-volume Egyptian Astronomical Texts with Otto Neugebauer. In a 1972 Dartmouth Alumni Magazine profile, Parker compared the study of the ancient world to a medical history: “It is just as important to know what man thought in the past, how he met crises, how he adapted, as it is for a doctor to know his patient’s health record. It gives us background against which to judge ourselves.” After his retirement in 1972, Parker maintained a rigorous research and publication practice. He passed away in 1993.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

Come to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology’s Open Collection Hours!  

Explore the Institute’s (hidden!) Collection of ancient ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, lithics, sherds, and more. Expert docents will be on hand to answer questions.

And plan ahead for future View the Vaults on the first Friday of the months of March, April, and May: March 7, April 4, and May 2. Join us for all of them!

Free and open to the public! All ages are welcome!

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “Careers in and Beyond the Professoriate”.

What can you do now to set yourself up for a successful career in early cultures after grad school? Join recent Brown PhDs Jen Thum (Harvard University Art Museums) and Josh Schnell (U. of Pittsburgh, Dept. of Anthropology) as they discuss their thoughts and answer your questions about this very important topic!

We will meet in Rhode Island Hall, Room 008 at 12pm.

Please RSVP by noon on February 21st to book your free lunch!

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

Professor Susan Harvey, Willard Prescott and Annie McClelland Smith Professor of History and Religion, Department of Religious Studies, will lead a workshop entitled “Adding Syriac: Beyond the Standard.” All graduate students and faculty across disciplines are welcome to join in developing active, informed, rigorous, and equitable pedagogical practices.

Please RSVP by noon on February 21st to book your free lunch!

Please join us for a talk by Rune Nyord, Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, on Wednesday, February 19, at 5:30 p.m. in Rhode Island Hall (Room 108). He will discuss topics from his forthcoming book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Paradise lost? The past, present, and future of the ancient Egyptian afterlife

The ancient Egyptians have been famous for their elaborate afterlife beliefs since long before the decipherment of hieroglyphs. The details are still familiar: The Egyptians believed they would be judged after death, leading either to damnation or to salvation and eternal life as reward for a virtuous life on earth. As I show in my new book Yearning for Immortality, the similarity of this picture to popular early modern and 19th-century versions of Christian doctrine is no accident, but the result of often quite systematic efforts to interpret Egyptian religion in ways that made sense to European scholars and their readers. Moreover, these efforts can be traced almost seamlessly both before and after Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphic script, contradicting the widespread Egyptological idea of the decipherment marking a new, entirely empirical approach to the ancient culture. If the model still prevalent in Egyptology and popular culture alike was thus developed without input from ancient Egyptian sources on anything other than a surface level, where does that leave the study of Egyptian mortuary religion and funerary culture today? And how might we best go about exploring this central cultural phenomenon in the future?

Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology at Emory University, where he is also Director of the Program in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. His research focuses on conceptions and experiences of images and personhood especially in funerary culture, as well as the history and concepts of the discipline of Egyptology. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of several books, the most recent being the monographs Seeing Perfection: Ancient Egyptian Images beyond Representation (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

The aromas of ancient love are in the air!

Please join the Archaeology DigDUG on February 13th 3-4pm in RI Hall for a perfume crafting workshop using materials accessible to the Ancient Egyptians!

All are welcome!!! 

RSVP appreciated so we can be sure to have enough materials!

Christelle Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology at Brown University, will present her research in an informal lecture: “Interpreting the Last Pyramid of the Old Kingdom: Monumentality, Imagination, and the Narrative of Collapse.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

PEC welcomes Graduate Students interested in Early Cultures to join us for our next Grad Forum: “Writing and the Academic Career.”

Professors Johanna Hanink (Classics), Jason Protass (Religious Studies), and Parker VanValkenburgh (Anthropology) will share their thoughts and experiences, and answer students’ questions about both academic and non-academic writing, and the roles they play in an academic career.

We will meet in Rhode Island Hall, Room 008 at 12pm.

Please RSVP by 12:00pm, December 6th to book your free lunch.

What is the future of the history and art of the distant past? For decades, art and architectural historians have discussed declining interest in the study of topics prior to the modern era and the growing emphasis among emerging scholars and in current undergraduate curricula on modern and contemporary art. This is especially important given the ways in which specific and often fringe narratives of the past are being leveraged in support of various political ideologies in the current historical moment.

The Department of the History of Art and Architecture will host a symposium to reflect on the state of the field in the study of pre-modern art and architectural history (before 1500) across all geographic regions. This day-long symposium features a lineup of distinguished scholars selected because of their substantial contributions to the field over the years, including fulfilling leadership roles at prestigious art and architectural history programs and professional organizations. They will highlight and synthesize the states of their respective fields as well as debate future directions in pre-modern art and architectural historical scholarship.

Speakers include John R. Clarke (University of Texas at Austin), Milette Gaifman (Yale University), Mary Miller (Getty Research Institute), and Claire Bosc-Tiessé (Clark Art Institute).

SCHEDULE

10:00 - 10:30 Coffee and Welcome

10:30 -10:40 Introductory remarks (Itohan Osayimwese and Gretel Rodríguez)

10:40 - 11:20 Mary Miller (Yale/Getty Research Institute)

11:20 - 12:00 Milette Gaifman (Yale University)

12:00 - 12:30 Q&A

12:30 - 2:00 Lunch

2:00 - 2:40 John Clarke (UT Austin)

2:40 - 3:20 Claire Bosc-Tiessé (The Clark/CNRS)

3:20 - 3:40 Q&A

3:40 - 4:00 Coffee break

4:00 - 5:00 Round Table Discussion with guest speakers and Brown Faculty
(Sheila Bonde, Jeffrey Moser, Douglas Nickel, Gretel Rodríguez, Amy Russell)

5:00 - 6:00 Reception

REGISTRATION

• Register for the morning session here.
  • 10:00 am - 12:30 pm
• Register for the afternoon session here.
  • 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm

NOTE: THIS TALK IS NOW SCHEDULED FOR NOVEMBER 14.

Leah Neiman, a doctoral student in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her research in an informal lecture entitled, “Rethinking Royal Prominence: Locally Oriented Approaches to Social Organization and Resource Management in Middle Kingdom Settlements.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Regina Uhl, an AIA-DAI Visiting Scholar at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her research in an informal lecture titled, “Burial Mounds Between Hallstatt and Assur.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

The PEC Pedagogy Roundtable Series consists of workshops dedicated to the discussion of current pedagogical theory related to the teaching of ancient languages.

Mac Carley and Clare Kearns, PhD Candidates in Classics, will lead a workshop entitled “Graduate Pedagogy: Praxis and Publishing.” They will discuss their experiences co-authoring an article on graduate pedagogy for The Classical Outlook with Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston, touching on what they learned about graduate pedagogy, the state of pedagogical research in the field of Classics, and writing for a pedagogical journal. All graduate students and faculty across disciplines are welcome to join in developing active, informed, rigorous, and equitable pedagogical practices. 

The Program in Early Cultures warmly invites faculty, post-docs and graduate students to Happy Hour at the Faculty Club on October 15th at 5:30pm!

This event is intended to help those interested in applying for PEC funding to discuss potential event plans with other PEC students and faculty, as well as with the interim director.

To learn more about our Fall 2024 Grant Round, please visit the PEC website.

This is also a great opportunity to come socialize with the PEC community, we hope to see you there!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email early_cultures@brown.edu.

Jonathan Russell, Assistant Professor of Egyptology and Assyriology, will present an informal lecture titled, “The Power of Substance Transformation: Re-evaluating The Role of Beer Brewing Technology in Ancient Egyptian Therapeutic Recipe Compositions.”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Soren Stark is Professor of Central Asian Archaeology at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He has close to two decades of experience in conducting and directing archaeological fieldwork in Central Asia. Between 2005 and 2007 he conducted and co-directed archaeological surveys and excavations in Northern Tajikistan on Bronze and Iron age petroglyphs, Iron age kurgans, and Samanid-Qarakhanid period mountain settlements; from 2011 to 2015 he codirected surveys and excavations at various monuments related with the oasis wall of Bukhara. Since 2015 he is co-directing an archaeological field project investigating agro-pastoral groups in Western Sogdiana during the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic period, centered on excavations at the desert site of Bashtepa.

Professor Stark’s current research interests are, among others, on Hellenistic and Late Antique/Early Medieval Sogdiana and the archaeology and history of nomadic groups close to oasis territories in Western Central Asia. His publications include a monograph on the archaeology of the 6th-8th century Türks in Inner and Central Asia, an exhibition catalogue on Early Iron Age kurgans from Kazakhstan, and numerous articles and book chapters on the history and archaeology of Sogdiana between the Hellenistic and the Islamic periods. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Inner Asian Art and Archaeology (at Brepols) and is currently co-editor of Brill’s Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8: Uralic & Central Asian Studies (HO8).

Professor Stark received his PhD in 2005 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Before joining the faculty of ISAW, he was Junior Fellow at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI and teaching at the Freie Universität in Berlin.

In the light of current domestic and international events, we are at a moment at which political discourse in and about the academic classroom is both particularly pressing and particularly fraught. Classroom discussions may become unusually heated, or, to the contrary, students may already seem politically exhausted and disaffected—both of which pose challenges for teachers hoping to engage their students in academic and civic life. And not only are there challenges around the emergence of politics in the classroom; the academic classroom itself has emerged as a political issue, with partisan debates about what should be taught and how—and with those debates having especially significant implications for pedagogy and scholarship regarding gender, sexuality, race, and ongoing imperialist violences. How should we best negotiate the complexities of politics inthe classroom, politics aboutthe classroom, and the politics ofthe classroom itself?

This event from the Pembroke Center’s “LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative” is designed to provide a space for participants actively to engage with these questions. While we will be spurred by an introduction (Lynne Joyrich, LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative Director and Professor of Modern Culture and Media) and by brief opening reflections by members of the Brown community—Nadje Al-Ali (Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies), Isaac Essex (PhD Student in American Studies), Katie Rieser (Director of Teacher Education and Senior Lecturer in Education), and Andre Willis (Associate Professor of Religious Studies)—all attendees are encouraged to participate in open discussion.

All interested Brown and RISD faculty, teaching staff, and teaching graduate students are invited to register. RSVP https://www.eventbrite.com/e/politics-and-pedagogy-political-discourse-in-and-of-the-classroom-tickets-999629838757. 

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

Francesca Schironi, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan

“Scientific Times Call for Scientific Measure(ment)s: Hipparchus on Aratus, and Beyond”

Hipparchus of Nicaea (ca. 150 BCE) is the most famous astronomer of the Hellenistic age; yet, of his vast production, only one work has survived to the present day by direct tradition: a polemical commentary aimed at Aratus’ Phaenomena and his scientific source, Eudoxus, entitled Exegesis of the Phaenomena of Eudoxus and Aratus (more generally known as th Commentary on Aratus). Though a relatively minor work in his scientific production, the Exegesis allows us to reconstruct some of the main achievements of Hipparchus and place them in the context of his time. In this lecture I will give an overview of Hipparchus’ criticism of Aratus as well as of Hipparchus’ own innovations in astronomy, situating them in the cultural and scientific debates of the Hellenistic period.

About Francesca Schironi

I am Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. My research interests focus on three main areas, Hellenistic scholarship and literary and sub-literary papyrology, Hellenistic science, and reception studies.

Before coming to Michigan and after my PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy (1997-2002), I was a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford (2001-2004), Research Assistant at the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Project ‘Imaging Papyri’, Oxford (2004), Assistant and Associate Professor at Harvard University (2004-2010).

About the Neugebauer Lecture Series

The Neugebauer Lecture is one of three lectures named after the founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). Born in Innsbruck in 1899, Otto Neugebauer was a mathematician and historian of science who was known for his groundbreaking research on the history of astronomy and mathematics as
they were practiced in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 1933, Neugebauer took a principled stand and resigned from his position at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen following the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues at the Institute. He left Germany and moved initially to the University of Copenhagen, where he spent the next six years until, in 1939, he moved to the United States where there was competition to hire him from Brown University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Deciding Brown was better suited to his work, Neugebauer took up a position as Professor of Mathematics. In 1947, he was appointed founding chair of the newly created Department of History of Mathematics. Neugebauer remained chair of the department until his retirement in 1969. He remained an extremely active scholar until his death in 1990.

Join the Program in Early Cultures for our next Grad Forum! April’s discussion will center on TAing at Brown.

This will be an opportunity for experienced TAs and those preparing to TA to share best practices and practical tips for TAing at Brown. There will be no faculty panel. Open to all graduate students with interests in early cultures: please come and share your ideas and questions.

This would also be a good chance to talk to the PEC Director if you are enrolled in or considering the Graduate Certificate in Early Cultures and want help finding a cross-departmental TA assignment.

Céline Debourse, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Making Priest and Temple in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (484–60 BCE)

In 484 BCE, Xerxes crushed several Babylonian revolts against his rule. One of the results was an almost complete disruption of Babylonian temple life as it had existed up until that point. While in most places the cult never resumed, in the city of Babylon the worship of the gods was eventually reinstated and even flourished again. In this talk, I ask how Babylon’s community undertook this process of rebuilding the temple, both in terms of how the worship of the gods was actually organized and how the rebuilding process was ideally envisioned and legitimized. After all, these people’s undertaking was not so straightforward, as the foreign kings who ruled over them no longer cared for the gods of Babylon.

About Céline Debourse

Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines.

Her research centers around two broad themes. First, she is interested in the final stages of cuneiform history and its reactions to and interactions with foreign imperial rule. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. In her current book project, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform (331 BCE–224 CE), she seeks to study the latest history of the city of Babylon from a comparative perspective and to contend with the challenges presented by the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the cuneiform record.

The second main theme in her research is ancient ritual. Her interest in this topic ranges from the cuneiform textual tradition reflecting ritual to the application of modern theories to ancient ritual. Moreover, she explores how ritual can be an innovative and useful tool for historical research (see the co-edited volume, Ceremonies, Feasts, and Festivities in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean World, Zaphon, 2023). She is currently working on a comprehensive study of the corpus of Late Babylonian ritual texts, which will include updated editions and extensive analysis.

About the Sachs Lecture Series

The Sachs Lecture is one of three lectures named after founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). After receiving his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1939, Abe Sachs worked on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago, where a chance meeting with Otto Neugebauer led to Brown University in 1941. After two years at Brown as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Sachs became one of the founding members of the History of Mathematics Department (instituted in 1943), eventually serving as its chair. Sachs collaborated on important contributions to the history of mathematics and astronomy, and, together with Albrecht Goetze, he founded the Journal of Cuneiform Studies in 1947. Sachs was a beloved teacher and respected colleague, and after his retirement he remained active at Brown as an adjunct professor until his untimely death in 1983.

How, why, when, and where do novel writing systems come into being? The inception of Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Chinese Oracle Bone graphs receive merited attention. Yet, by ample evidence, scripts appear at many other times and places, usually through contact with earlier systems of recording. To this day, writing continues to be devised under varied conditions of social, linguistic, religious, and aesthetic tumult and possibility, need and amusement. “Guided Inventions” looks at how scripts coalesce in response to prior scripts. A breadth of examples attests to the importance of this process, ranging from Africa to Indigenous America, the ancient Aegean to Scandinavian runes, Hollywood fabulations to the results of encounters with spirits. But the topic remains under-explored. Addressing that need, “Guided Inventions” seeks to find what these inventions share and how they differ. Joining the debate will be archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists, each intent on understanding how, from the makers’ viewpoint, systems of imaginative marking help to graft meaning, language, and practice.

Schedule of Events

12:00-12:30 Welcome and Opening Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

12:30-1:00 Silvia Ferrara (University of Bologna), “Leading the way? Cretan Hieroglyphic and Rongorongo (Rapa Nui)”

1:00-1:30 Yoolim Kim (Wellesley College), “Writing and cognition: Distinctiveness, complexity, and informativeness of letter shapes”

1:30-2:00 Coffee Break

2:00-2:30 Piers Kelly (University of New England), “Signs and wonders: Miraculous revelation and recuperation as recurring motifs in global origin stories about writing”

2:30-3:00 Bérénice Gaillemin (Getty Research Institute), “On some glotografic inventions from the Florentine Codex (Mexico, 16th century)”

3:00 Discussion & Closing Remarks by Stephen Houston & Felipe Rojas (Brown University)

Organized by Stephen Houston (Anthropology / History of Art and Architecture) &  Felipe Rojas (JIAAW / Egyptology & Assyriology)

Arts and Humanities PhD Students are invited to join us for a conversation with Jeremy Eichler. The conversation will be moderated by Annie Kim, Ph.D. candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology.

A writer, scholar and critic, Jeremy Eichler is the author of Time’s Echo, a celebrated new book on music, war and memory that was named “History Book of the Year” by The Sunday Timesand hailed as “the outstanding music book of this and several years” by The Times Literary Supplement. Chosen as a notable book of 2023 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR, Time’s Echo recently won three National Jewish Book Awards including “Jewish Book of the Year,” and was a finalist for the UK’s premier non-fiction award, the Baillie Gifford Prize, whose jury described the book as “a masterpiece of nonfiction writing.”

This spring, Eichler delivers endowed lectures or serves as a featured speaker at Yale, Tufts, Wellesley, Columbia, the University of Virginia, and Toronto’s Royal Conservatory of Music. At Brown University, he partners with BroadBand Collaborative to present Time’s Echo Live, a new music-and-memory program whose fall premiere was chosen as Musical America’s top Boston event of 2023. In May, he partners with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra in Hamburg for a program celebrating the launch of the book’s German edition, one of eight foreign language translations recently published or forthcoming.

The recipient of an NEH Public Scholar award and a fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Eichler earned his PhD in modern European history at Columbia and has taught at Brandeis. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorkerand many other national publications, and since 2006, he has served as chief classical music critic of TheBoston Globe.For more information, please visit www.timesecho.com.

Light refreshments will be provided. This is a hybrid event that will take place in person at the Nightingale-Brown House and on Zoom.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

***PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO THE IMPENDING WINTER STORM, THIS MONTH’S MEETING WILL BE HELD OVER ZOOM. EMAIL EARLY_CULTURES@BROWN.EDU FOR THE LINK***

Ethics, Exploitation, and Epistemic Reparations around the Classical Archive

A workshop sponsored by the Program in Early Cultures led by Prof. Nandini Pandey, Johns Hopkins University

All are welcome to join this workshop on the ethics of what (and how) we read and cite. The main case study centers on Foucault’s heterotopia as applied to Roman antiquity, but the questions the workshop raises will be of interest to many disciplines.

Do the lives, biographies, and behaviors of the scholars we use within our own work matter? How do we deal with sources who have abused others to create products we find valuable, and does it matter if they lived in the ancient past or recent memory? How far do the norms of their times excuse behaviors we might now find repugnant? How can we engage with our disciplines’ archives and theories in order to investigate and redress their co-formation with race, imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism, without recentering the abusers? What reparations or atonement might we owe in using such scholars’ work, or should we cast it out altogether – in which case, what sources and methods do we have left?

This workshop begins with a chapter-in-progress (to be pre-circulated to preregistered participants, but with no advance reading required) for a volume on Roman spatial theory edited by Amy Russell and Maxine Lewis, in which Nandini Pandey (of Johns Hopkins University) applies Foucault’s theory of heterotopic space to the city of Rome. In researching her article, Pandey became interested in ways that Foucault’s theory centers an elite white man’s experience of space, and how recent allegations that Foucault sexually abused Tunisian children might have informed his spatial fetishization of the other. How should this context affect our applications of Foucault’s theory to Roman spaces that themselves facilitated elites’ (ab)use of ‘diverse’ subaltern peoples and objects? This workshop promises no answers, but will generate conversations of interest to many. All are welcome to join discussion, and no prior familiarity with theory or content is expected.

Please register by Tuesday 6 February.

You’re invited to a watch party of a livestream of an Oxford lecture on Elizabeth Rieken and Ilya Yakubovich’s work with a Hittite tablet preserving a new Anatolian language, kalašmaili, and their ideas about its structure and place in the wider family.

Meet in RI Hall 109 (the Common Room) to watch the lecture beginning promptly at 12 noon on Friday, February 2. There may be snacks (and/or bring your own)!

The Department of Comparative Literature offers a Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies that enables graduate students to develop and document expertise in the philosophy, history, and craft of translation. By certifying skill in translation or translation studies, the Certificate offers a supplemental endorsement for students pursuing academic or non-academic job opportunities that involve translation. During this session, Comp Lit Professors Esther Whitfield and Ourida Mostefai, along with Comp Lit PhD. student Dima Nasser, will review the details of the certificate program.

Join us, grab pizza, and learn about the certification requirements and application process!

CRAM is a work-in-progress group for graduate, postdoctoral, and faculty researchers working on the cultures and religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. The paper to be discussed is pre-circulated; to be added to the circulation group please email amy_russell@brown.edu.

Robyn Price, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, will discuss her research in an informal talk titled, “Immeasurable Delights: Gardens and Sensory Indulgence in Ancient Egypt”. 

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Leah Neiman, a doctoral student at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, will discuss her research in an informal talk entitled, “Reciprocal Care or Royal Coercion? Gramscian Common Sense, Consciousness, and Subalternity amongst Workers at Deir el-Medina”.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

The Program in Early Cultures warmly invites faculty, post-docs and graduate students focused on the study of pre-modern cultures, to join us for Happy Hour at the Faculty Club! This event is intended to help those interested in applying for PEC funding to discuss potential event plans with other PEC students and faculty, as well as with Amy Russell. This is also a great opportunity to come socialize with the PEC community, we hope to see you there!

Join the Dig DUG for our annual Spoo0o0o0o0ooo0oky Pumpkin Painting!!!

Come meet the Archaeology Dig DUG, paint some pumpkins, and enjoy some Halloween candy! No need to bring your own pumpkin (not BYOP!), we’ve got you covered!

On Wednesday, Oct. 11 at 6 pm in Rhode Island Hall 108, the DigDUG will be hosting Field Dirt: Undergrad Edition! This event is free and open to the public - all are welcome!

The event will be relatively similar to the OG Field Dirt, with students giving short presentations (presentation length dependent on total number of presenters) with time for questions and discussion reserved until the time for mingling (and eating the free food!) at the end of the event.

And, if you are a Brown undergrad in any concentration who did something archaeology-related (e.g. museum work, lab research, public heritage work, excavation, etc.) with your summer, we want you to come present about it! This event is a great opportunity for you to present about the research and/or work you did this summer, to get practice presenting for the future, and to see what all your awesome peers did too.

Zachary Silvia, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, will discuss his research in an informal talk entitled, “Recent Explorations in the Bukhara Oasis, Uzbekistan: Towards an Archaeology of Rural Lifeways in Hellenistic Central Asia”.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

The Department of Comparative Literature offers a Graduate Certificate in Translation Studies that enables graduate students to develop and document expertise in the philosophy, history, and craft of translation. By certifying skill in translation or translation studies, the Certificate offers a supplemental endorsement for students pursuing academic or non-academic job opportunities that involve translation. During this session, Comp Lit Prof. Esther Whitfield, along with Comp Lit PhD student Dima Nasser, will review the details of the certificate program.

Join us on Monday, April 3 at 12 pm to grab pizza, and learn about the certification requirements and application process!

About the lecture: As a new Jewish culture, the rabbinic edifice is conspicuously distinct in content and scope from the postbiblical Jewish library created over the preceding centuries. Indeed, the rabbis consistently silenced, and almost entirely ignored the extensive literature created in the land of Israel and the Diaspora during the Second Temple period. On the other hand, no set of values, nor any literary work, emerges in a vacuum. Religious civilizations always share overt and covert connections with previous traditions, and rabbinic literature is no exception.

This lecture explores the presence of typical Second Temple period themes and ideas in rabbinic literature. It surveys several examples of pre- and non-rabbinic texts and concepts that survived and infiltrated rabbinic literature, and examines the sophisticated fashion in which they were censored, adapted, and “rabbinized” in the process of incorporation in their new ideological context.

About the speaker: Professor Vered Noam is a BJS Visiting Scholar.  She teaches in the Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Shifting Images of the Hasmoneans: Second Temple Legends and Their Reception in Josephus and Rabbinic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2018). She was a winner of both The Michael Bruno Memorial Award and the Israel Prize in Talmud. 

Come eat pizza and watch an iconic archaeological movie (yes, you know the one) with the Archaeology Departmental Undergraduate Group – the Dig DUG. Panama hats and snake repellant not required; one ark will be provided. All are welcome!

Facing Invisibility is an exhibit by the students in ARCH 1622, “Art, Secrecy, and Invisibility in Ancient Egypt,” curated for the Joukowsky Institute by Professor Laurel Bestock. Ancient Egypt is well known for having produced large and eminently visible art and architecture. But a persistent theme in Egyptian visual culture is that of invisibility, of art made and then deliberately hidden or destroyed. The range of examples is vast and varied, suggesting a complex relationship between visibility and meaning. This exhibit explores how unseeable art intersects with themes of audience, agency, and time in ancient Egypt.

Reflections | Ancient Objects/Modern Issues is an exhibit by the students in ARCH 1500, “Classical Art from Ruins to RISD: Ancient Objects/Modern Issues,” curated for the Joukowsky Institute by Cicek Beeby, Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology and the Ancient World. The exhibition presents research and creative commentary on selected objects from the Ancient Greek and Roman Galleries of the RISD Museum. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Mediterranean and connecting past with the present, our artists and contributors pull on threads of personhood, identity, belonging, belief, relationships, communication, power, and privilege.

Breton Langendorfer, Visiting Lecturer in Brown University’s History of Art and Architecture, will discuss his research in an informal talk.

Breton Langendorfer is a scholar of the pre-Islamic Middle East, specializing in the art and visual culture of ancient Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia. He received his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, writing a dissertation which explored the connections between the depiction of city sieges in the Assyrian palace reliefs and mythic conceptualizations of cosmic entropy and dissolution in Mesopotamia. His current research projects focus on the Bronze Age cultures of the Iranian plateau, and the use of ornamental repetition and replication in Achaemenid art. Before arriving at Brown he taught at the University of New Hampshire and Colby-Sawyer College.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: https://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2022/10/03/brownbags-fall22/

Come to the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology’s Open Collection Hours! Explore the Institute’s (hidden!) Collection of ancient ceramic vessels, lamps, figurines, lithics, sherds, and more.

Viewing the Collection may also be possible by appointment. Please email joukowsky_institute@brown.edu beforehand to arrange a visit.

Join the DigDUG (aka Archaeology Undergraduate Group) for pumpkin painting and sharing spooky stories. Archaeology-themed costumes not required (but encouraged)! All students are welcome, no need to be an Archaeology concentrator or even have taken an ARCH course!

If you are planning to attend the Halloween Spooktacular, please fill out this Google Form as an RSVP – as always, everyone is welcome, but this will help us make sure that we have enough pumpkins for everyone!

Please join us for the 2022 Sachs Lecture in Assyriology: Professor Jana Mynářová (Charles University, Prague) will present her lecture entitled “Peace, War, and Violence in the Ancient Near East.” There will be a reception following this lecture.

J. Mynářová is Head of the Institute of Comparative Linguistics at Charles University in Prague. She acquired her PhD. in Philology - Languages of Asia and Africa (Semitic Languages) with her dissertation entitled “Greeting Formulae in Peripheral Akkadian”. She specializes above all in the relationships between Egypt and the Near East in the 2nd millennium B.C., ancient diplomacy, Egyptian history and society in the New Kingdom, Peripheral Akkadian and Ugaritic.

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology is pleased to present the 2022 Neugebauer Lecture on the History of Exact Sciences in Antiquity.

Professor Annette Imhausen (Goethe-Universität) will deliver her lecture entitled, “Don’t Limit the Past by the Present - Glimpses Into Ancient Egyptian Mathematics and its Historiography,” on Thursday, September 29 at 5 PM. The lecture will be in-person, location to be announced. Reception to follow.

About Professor Annette Imhausen:

Annette Imhausen is a German historian of mathematics known for her work on Ancient Egyptian Mathematics. She is Professor for the History of Sciences in the Premodern World at Goethe-University Frankfurt. Imhausen is the author of Mathematics in Ancient Egypt: A Contextual History (Princeton University Press, 2016). She is also featured in the BBC TV series The Story of Maths. Having studied mathematics, history of mathematics, and Egyptology, she is at work on the history of pre-Greek mathematics, specifically contexts, techniques and transmission of ancient Egyptian mathematics from the invention of writing (around 3000 BCE) until the Graeco-Roman period.

About the Neugebauer Lecture Series:

The Neugebauer Lecture is one of three lectures named after the founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). Born in Innsbruck in 1899, Otto Neugebauer was a mathematician and historian of science who was known for his groundbreaking research on the history of astronomy and mathematics as
they were practiced in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In 1933, Neugebauer took a principled stand and resigned from his position at the Mathematical Institute in Göttingen following the dismissal of his Jewish colleagues at the Institute. He left Germany and moved initially to the University of Copenhagen, where he spent the next six years until, in 1939, he moved to the United States where there was competition to hire him from Brown University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Deciding Brown was better suited to his work, Neugebauer took up a position as Professor of Mathematics. In 1947, he was appointed founding chair of the newly created Department of History of Mathematics. Neugebauer remained chair of the department until his retirement in 1969. He remained an extremely active scholar until his death in 1990.

The pieces in this show include manuscripts from various ancient cultures, never-before seen modern books, rare musical and dance performances, vintage bottles of wine, popular foodstuffs, even the tooth of an extra-planetary creature. Some of these pieces were made expressly for this exhibition, others were purloined or kindly lent to us by their makers, many of them expert forgers.

The objects on display have only two things in common: first of all, they were collected or produced in the Spring of 2022. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they all remain under the shadow of forgery.

As Umberto Eco once argued, “there certainly exist tools, either empirical or conjectural, to prove that something is a fake, but every judgment on the question presupposes the existence of an original that is authentic and true, against which the forgery is compared … the real cognitive problem consists not only in proving that something is a forgery but in proving that the authentic object is just that: authentic.” Ultimately, then, the viewer will have to decide what distinguishes a fake object from an authentic one.

The exhibit opens with a reception on May 6th, from 7:00-7:30pm. The art will be on show through the end of May.

Join members of the Comp Lit class of 2022 for the Honors Thesis Forum.  There will be presentations of honors theses by Comp Lit students, followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by Comp Lit DUS, Prof. Elias Muhanna.

Presentations by:

• Iznara Benoit-Kornhauser
• Benjamin Connor
• Daviana Perez
• Neil Salzman
• Penina Satlow
• Michael Wang
• Amelia Wyckoff

If you are an undergraduate student interested in Comp Lit, a current Comp Lit concentrator considering pursuing honors, or have an interest in Comparative Literature, feel free to stop by! 

Refreshments will be served and all are welcome.  We look forward to seeing you there!

New Bedford’s Whaling Waterfront: Recovering Historic Places and Viewsheds through a Mobile Walking Tour

Please join the Program in Early Cultures for The Architecture of Imperialism: A Roundtable on the Built Environment at the Periphery of Early Empires on April 27th from 4 - 6 pm in Petteruti Lounge.  Prof. Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature) will chair the event with panelists Gretel Rodriguez (History of Art and Architecture),
Amy Russell (Classics), and Parker VanValkenburgh (Anthropology).  This event is free and open to the public.  To register and receive preparatory readings, please visit this link. 

May Amnesia Never Kiss Us On The Mouth website

In this on-line conversation with Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, we will be discussing their latest project against the background of their wider art practice that is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth” examines how people are witness to and narrate experiences of violence, loss, erasure, displacement, and forced migration through performance.

This event is cosponsored by the David Winton Bell Gallery.

This conversation will be the opening event to a series of talks, events and exhibitions jointly organized by CMES, Brown and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University to explore art, gender and body politics in relation to the Middle East and its diasporas.

Panelists
Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas
Nadje Al-Ali
Kathryn Spellman-Poots

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology cordially invites you to our weekly colloquium on Tuesday, April 26 at 12pm on Zoom. Anne-Claire Salmas (American University in Cairo) will talk to us about “The Tomb of the Two Brothers at Deir el-Medina (Theban Tomb 2-2B).” You can join the talk via this link: https://brown.zoom.us/j/99687330833.

About the Event
Since 2021, several Israeli and mainstream human rights organizations, have concluded what Palestinians have long known and insisted upon: Israel is an apartheid regime. Despite the welcome, and long-awaited, synergy between them, there remains significant analytical divergence among these organizations and Palestinian activists and scholars. In particular, while the reports emphasize that Israel has become an apartheid regime as a result of its failure to establish a Palestinian state, Palestinians have pointed to Zionist ideology to insist that Israel did not become become a discriminatory regime but is defined by such discrimination. This lecture will explore the implications of this analytical divergence by examining the juridical framework of apartheid embodied in the 1973 Convention consecrating it as a crime against humanity. It will also trace the Palestinian intellectual tradition to highlight that Zionism is not like apartheid but that the ideologies constitute intellectual and political bedfellows. Finally, by visiting the drafting history of UNGA Resolution 3379 (1975) declaring Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, the lecture will help fill a glaring lacuna in the recent apartheid reports regarding racial theories of Zionism.

About the Speaker
Noura Erakat is an associate professor of Africana Studies and in the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, and non-resident fellow of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School. Her research interests include human rights law, laws of armed conflict, national security law, as well as critical race theory. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Her recent scholarship includes, “Geographies of Intimacy: Contemporary Renewals of Black-Palestinian Solidarity” (American Quarterly, 2020) and “The Sovereign Right to Kill: A Critical Appraisal of Israel’s Shoot-To-Kill Policy” (International Criminal Law Review, 2019). Noura has also produced video documentaries, including “Gaza In Context” and “Black Palestinian Solidarity.” She has appeared on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others.

Palestinians have long developed a racial theory of Zionism. The Oslo Peace Process, initiated in the early 1990s, subsumed these theories and others that poignantly framed the Palestinian freedom struggle as one against settler colonization, into a peace and justice framework that eschewed the consequential dimension of power. The collapse of the Peace Process at the Camp David talks in 2000 and the Second Palestinian Intifada that followed created fertile grounds for Palestinian advocates and intellectuals to return to a racial and colonial analysis to describe their conditions of unfreedom. The 2014 Gaza-Ferguson moment, marking renewals of Black Palestinian transnational solidarity, catalyzed these analytical returns and acutely re-centered the questions of race, racism, and Palestine among analysts, activists, and scholars. This panel featuring leading scholars of race, law, colonialism, and political economy will take on some of these questions to address racial ideologies, Palestinian intellectual traditions, anti-Blackness, legacies of slavery in the Middle East, and sovereignty frameworks to undergird and advance these ongoing conversations.

Presenters:

Noura Erakat, Rutgers University, NJ

Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University, PA

John Reynolds, Maynooth University, Ireland

Sherene Seikaly University of California, Santa Barbara

Lana Tatour, University of South Wales, Australia

This is a hybrid event. The hosts will be in the auditorium. Panelists will be presenting remotely. Remote audience members will participate and submit their questions via webinar. The audience in the auditorium does not need to register.

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology cordially invites you to our weekly colloquium: Sabrina Bier (Humboldt University of Berlin) will present “Observational Practices in the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts” on Tuesday, April 19 at 12pm. If you can’t attend in person, please join us on Zoom: https://brown.zoom.us/j/95432848545.

Dr. Alicia Odewale is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. Her research interests include the archaeology of enslavement and freedom, Caribbean archaeology, community-based archaeology, ceramic analysis, transferware studies, and investigations into forms of cultural resistance. She serves as the director of the Historical Archaeology and Heritage Studies Laboratory at TU and as the co-creator of the Estate Little Princess Archaeological Field School in St. Croix. She seeks to build an anti-racist archaeology alongside other Black archaeologists who are revolutionizing the field of archaeology with the next generation in mind. She continues to utilize community-centered, restorative justice, anti-racist, and Black feminist archaeology methods to examine artifacts recovered from Estate Little Princess, a Danish sugar plantation. A central part of building this community driven, anti-racist archaeology in the Virgin Islands has been the development of the Estate Little Princess Archaeological Field School, which has opened up a pipeline for students from middle school to graduate school offering unprecedented access to archaeological training for free.

This webinar is part of the series New Directions in Caribbean Archaeology.

House of Fields film director Tala Hadid ’95 in conversation with Adel Ben Bella, PhD student in Modern Culture and Media.

Film Synopsis: A loving portrait of an Amazigh community high in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco centering around two sisters. With mixed feelings of hope and trepidation, Fatima is preparing to marry a man she hardly knows and move to Casablanca. She really wants to go to work after she’s married, but doesn’t know if her husband will allow it. In anticipation of the wedding, she is forced to drop out of school. Her younger sister Khadija is a good student and dreams of becoming a lawyer. This ambition seems contrary to the traditional beliefs of the remote mountain village where the two girls grew up. The film switches between beautiful images of nature and everyday life and more intimate footage, including of the sisters waking up and of a conversation between Khadija and a girlfriend about women’s rights in Morocco. House in the Fieldsis the first part of a planned trilogy, the next part of which will be set in Casablanca.

Architecture and the Formation of Urban Communities in the Roman Central Mediterranean

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology cordially invites you to our graduate student colloquium on Tuesday, April 5 at 12pm. Sara Mohr will present her paper “Hollywood, Archaeology, and the Exotic Revival Architecture of Los Angeles.”

What can we learn from ancient art and architecture?

From wing-shaped vessels to dancing figurines, archaeology has a story to tell us about the lives and imaginations of people who lived thousands of years ago.

“The Stories Objects Tell” is a campus-wide artshow organized by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and curated by Kristen Marchetti ’22 with assistance from Erynn Bentley ’25 Ph.D. Works included in the show may be a response to archaeology in general or to objects in the Joukowsky Institute’s collection of art and artifacts.

The exhibit’s opening reception will take place from 4-5 PM on Thursday, March 24th, 2022.

The show can be viewed from Monday, March 14-Thursday, April 14 throughout Rhode Island Hall.

Title:

Chosen Glories vs. Chosen Traumas: Interpreting Post-Abandonment Visitation to LM IIIC Refuge Settlements on Crete through the Lens of Social Trauma Theory

The Department of Egyptology & Assyriology cordially invites you to our weekly colloquium on Tuesday, March 22 at 12pm! Christopher Cox will be presenting “Mirroring the Gods: The Symmetrical Lunette Motif on Kushite Royal Stelae.”

Isotope analyses are increasingly applied to the bioarchaeological record to address a wide range of research questions pertaining to human migrations, dietary patterns, and the exchange of biogenic materials and objects. This presentation will track the development and application of these methods to studies in Caribbean. It explores the potentials of isobiographies, highly detailed life history reconstructions, obtained via the combination of multiple tissue sampling and multiple isotope proxies. These are demonstrated through various cases studies focusing on the identification of migrants and their origins; assessing dietary changes and nutritional stress linked to long-distance migration, and exploring long-distance exchange networks. The presentation will also provide a critical reflection on the persistent challenges and future prospects of isotope approaches in this region.

Jason Laffoon is an Assistant Professor and Head of the Department of Archaeological Science, Faculty of Archaeology, at Leiden University. His main research interests focus on integrating bioarchaeological and biochemical approaches to the study of patterns of mobility/migration, diet, and exchange.

This webinar is part of the series New Directions in Caribbean Archaeology.

Title:

Diverse Strategies: Human-Environmental Relationships and Agricultural Origins in Southern Ontario’s Grand River Valley.

Climate change presents a major threat to archaeological heritage in the small islands of the Eastern Caribbean. The effects of tourism-based economic development in island economies also poses a significant threat to cultural heritage. We will reflect on our experience documenting heritage resources in this perfect storm and discuss major issues and initiatives in the region including capacity building and community engagement.

John G. Crock is an Associate Professor and Director of Consulting Archaeology Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vermont. He is an archaeologist specializing in pre-Contact northeastern North America and the pre-Columbian Caribbean with research interests including human-environment interaction, maritime adaptation, trade and exchange, the development of inequality, and heritage management. Dr. Crock received his B.A. from the University of Vermont in 1989 where his experience as an Anthropology major inspired him to become a professional archaeologist. After conducting cultural resource management archaeology in New England and the Caribbean, he went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. That same year, John returned to UVM, joined the faculty and also became the Director of UVM’s Consulting Archaeology Program (CAP).

Jay Haviser, Director of the St. Maarten Archaeological Center (SIMARC), is an archaeologist and anthropologist who has conducted archaeological fieldwork in St. Martin and Curacao. Dr. Haviser received his BA and MS from Florida State University, and his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Royal University of Leiden. He was formerly was a researcher at Leiden University and has served as vice president of the International Association of Caribbean Archaeology.

This webinar is part of the series New Directions in Caribbean Archaeology.

A paper by Felipe Rojas (JIAAW/Egyptology and Assyriology).

The Brown University seminar on Cultures and Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (CRAM) serves as a gathering to promote high-level, interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty and graduate students who deal with religion and culture in the ancient Mediterranean basin and west Asia in the broadest terms. CRAM meets monthly during the academic year. Each meeting lasts about an hour, and typically is centered on a pre-circulated paper by one of our participants. We are especially interested in work in progress; CRAM is a great context for working on new ideas and thinking through new problems.

Please note that all meetings will take place on Tuesdays, 12:00-12:55 p.m. EST, on Zoom. Papers will be distributed by e-mail approximately ten days prior to the date indicated for your preparation; the Zoom link will be included at that time. Newcomers are always welcome!

Please contact early_cultures@brown.edu to receive the zoom link.

A paper by M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro (Egyptology and Assyriology).

The Brown University seminar on Cultures and Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean (CRAM) serves as a gathering to promote high-level, interdisciplinary dialogue among faculty and graduate students who deal with religion and culture in the ancient Mediterranean basin and west Asia in the broadest terms. CRAM meets monthly during the academic year. Each meeting lasts about an hour, and typically is centered on a pre-circulated paper by one of our participants. We are especially interested in work in progress; CRAM is a great context for working on new ideas and thinking through new problems.

Please note that all meetings will take place on Tuesdays, 12:00-12:55 p.m. EST, on Zoom. Papers will be distributed by e-mail approximately ten days prior to the date indicated for your preparation; the Zoom link will be included at that time. Newcomers are always welcome!

Please contact early_cultures@brown.edu to receive the zoom link.

Talk by graduate student J. Rafael Saade, “Female Self-Ascription to Literacy in Egypt: An Ability to Write or a Social Role?” followed by Q&A

Professor Kim Plofker (Union College) will present the 4th Annual Otto Neugebauer Lecture in the History of Sciences in Antiquity.  Titled “Hindu-Muslim scientific collaboration and the quest for trigonometric accuracy in early modern South Asia” it will take place at 5 PM in RI Hall.

Learn to produce technical illustrations! Handle ancient objects close up!
Casual atmosphere, no experience or artistic confidence necessary!

Join the TrowelBlazers@Brown for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon aimed at improving content on women and other minority or historically marginalized communities in archaeological research. Drop in anytime between 11am and 2pm - no background in archaeology or experience editing Wikipedia is needed! Instruction and resources (and food) will be provided. We recommend that you bring your own laptop if possible and that you create a Wikipedia account ahead of time.

Trowelblazers@Brown is a group of early career researchers from historically underrepresented communities and their allies coming together in solidarity to reflect on experiences in the field and academia and engage in meaningful exchanges related to gender issues and accessibility. This group is striving towards a more intersectional understanding of what it means to be a woman in archaeology and the challenges one may or may not face in doing so.

Laurel Bestock, Associate Professor of Egyptology and Archaeology and the Ancient World and Lutz Klein, Research Associate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology, will be discussing their research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2019/08/19/brown-bag-talks-for-fall-2019/

Raphael (Rafi) Greenberg, Associate Professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and Visiting Scholar at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2019/08/19/brown-bag-talks-for-fall-2019/

Martin Uildriks, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/12/06/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Gretel Rodríguez, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, and Willis Monroe, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia will present their work on The Database of Religious History in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/12/06/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

Thomas Tartaron is Associate Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also Chair of the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World Graduate Group. His research interests include Greek Bronze Age archaeology, Classical Archaeology, landscape archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeometry. Dr. Tartaron is currently working on oral history projects among traditional fishing communities in Greece (Thrace) and India (Kerala) as well as archaeological field survey at Molyvoti, Thrace (Greece). He has excavated extensively in Greece, and is the Co-Director of the Saronic Harbors Archaeological Research Project.

Network approaches to maritime interaction in the ancient Mediterranean have proliferated in recent years. Six years after publishing a qualitative, multi-scalar model of Mycenaean maritime networks (Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World), I assess the responses to it and discuss new directions in my research. In addition to collecting archaeological data on ancient “coastscapes” and “small worlds,” these new directions include ethnoarchaeological (oral history) research with “traditional” fishing and coastal communities in Greece, Cyprus, and India, as well as mining of textual sources cross-culturally. These studies highlight similarity and difference, and help to make network models more adaptable to local cultural and environmental conditions.

Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power as areas for ethnographic and theoretical engagement. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how certain kinds of truths mediate conceptions of self and conceptions of others – as psychiatric subjects, for example, or as subjects of history. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently working on her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus (forthcoming from Duke University Press), a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.”

Co-sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the Program in Modern Greek Studies.

Watch a video of the lecture here: Elizabeth Davis - The Wrong Kind of Politics

Dan Plekhov, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, will be discussing his research in an informal talk. Pizza and soda will be provided, or feel free to bring a lunch.

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit http://blogs.brown.edu/archaeology/2018/08/02/brown-bag-talks-for-spring-2019/

On December 11, Rev. Lysander Dickerman, D.D., Class of 1851 (portrayed by Sean Briody ’19), will lecture on “The Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt,” one of his world famous Egyptological lectures illustrated with stereopticon views. The lecture will be presented exactly as it was when Dr. Dickerman spoke before an audience of Brown University students on January 4, 1893. The event will take place in Rhode Island Hall, Room 108 at 1:30 pm. A short discussion about Dickerman, the field of Egyptology, and “Egyptomania” in the Victorian era will follow. Open to the public; all are welcome!
This event serves as the final project for an Independent Study with Professor Laurel Bestock.

Dr. Laura Banducci, Assistant Professor in Greek and Roman Studies at Carleton University, is an archaeologist, with a particular interest in the Roman republican period and in the Etruscan civilization of central Italy. Her research focuses on three principal areas: diet and dining practices, collectively referred to as ‘foodways’; how artefacts were made, used, re-purposed and discarded; and entertainment and leisure culture. Her research is grounded in the idea that an individual’s daily behavior, as reflected by the material record, can provide important insights into large-scale societal changes in the ancient world. She is currently completing a book that investigates the foodways of several sites in central Italy.

Professor Katherine Davis (UMich) will present “Speaking Signs and Silent Signs: Egyptian Descriptions of Writing as a Reflection of Scribal Practice”, based in part on her work in Thebes.