Spring Recess
Join the Haffenreffer Museum as we welcome Professor Emeritus, Douglas Anderson for a book talk as we celebrate the launch of his most recent publication The Inupiat of Northwest Alaska over the Past Millennium (2023).
In 1960 Anderson graduated in Anthropology (major) and Geology (minor) from the University of Washington before going to Brown University as the first graduate student in the field of anthropology there, with a focus in Arctic anthropology. After his MA in 1962 he spent a Fulbright year in Denmark studying Arctic collections at the Nationalmuseet and excavating in Godthaab Fjord, Greenland. He then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. 1967. He began teaching at Brown University in 1965, and in 1973 developed the department’s Laboratory for Circumpolar Studies, located at the university’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Bristol Rhode Island.
In the 1970’s he expanded his research interests to include Southeast Asia, with a focus on Pleistocene and Early-Middle Holocene archaeology.
Light refreshments will follow.
Free and open to the public.
RSVP Required for those who would like to have a signed copy of the book.
Supported by generous donors to the Friends of the Haffenreffer Museum.
A lecture with Laura Nasrallah, Yale Divinity School. Dr. Nasrallah is the Buckingham Professor of New Testament Criticism at Yale Divinity School and the Religious Studies Department at Yale University. Laura Nasrallah’s research and teaching bring together New Testament and early Christian literature with the archaeological remains of the Mediterranean world, and often engage issues of colonialism, gender, race, status, and power.
Harper Dine, a doctoral candidate in Brown University’s Department of Anthropology, will discuss her research in an informal talk, titled ”Local Landscape Contours: A Paleoethnobotanical Case Study of Two Rejolladas at Yaxuna and Joya, Yucatán, Mexico”.
For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/
Gordion, in central Turkey, was the capital of the Phrygian empire in Anatolia until about 600 B.C. By the mid 6th century, it came under Persian control as the Medes expanded their territory westward from their Iranian heartland. During the over 200 years of Persian control, the residents of Gordion imported a surprising amount of high quality Athenian fine ware pottery. The presence of Athenian pottery at Gordion prompts a number of questions that we will examine in this talk: HOW did it get there? Gordion lies 500 km from the Aegean and Black Sea coasts, which is unusual because exported Athenian pottery usually clings to the coasts in the Eastern Mediterranean. WHY did the residents of Gordion want Athenian pottery? At the height of importation in the late 6th and early 5th centuries B.C. weren’t the Persians and Athenians archenemies? In this talk, I will also demonstrate how a misguided research question can lead to unexpected answers. The mistake, it turns out, was to assume that the consumers and users of imported Athenian pottery were the Persians. In fact, actual Persians probably had little interest ceramic pots, which they deemed far inferior to metal vessels. Instead, throughout the Persian world, the pattern is clear: consumption of imported Athenian pottery continues at sites that had already been importing Athenian pottery before the shift to Persian control. In other words, it is not the Persian newcomers using the Athenian pottery but the indigenous Anatolian cultures. Connecting themselves to the Greeks (if not the Athenians, specifically) signaled a desire to maintain their existing cultural identities, and perhaps, a little resistance to the Persians.
Short bibliography and/or website on lecture topic (for lay reader):
Dusinberre, E. 2013. Empire, Authority, and Autonomy in Achaemenid Anatolia, Cambridge UP, New York.
Canepa, M. 2018. The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE-642 CE, University of California Press, Oakland.
Miller, M. 1997. Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C.: A Study in Cultural Receptivity, Cambridge UP, New York.
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the Narragansett Society, the Rhode Island chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Password: TimesEcho
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.
Learn to produce technical illustrations! Handle ancient objects close up!
Casual atmosphere, no experience or artistic confidence necessary! Drop in any time. Bring your lunch, if you’d like!
Zachary Silvia, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, will discuss his research in an informal talk, titled ”Ancient Sogdiana and the Emergence of the Northern “Silk Road” (4th-1st c. BCE): New Archaeological Discoveries from Bukhara, Uzbekistan”.
For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/
In this talk, Kevin Fisher presents the results of recent work by the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, which is investigating the relationship between urban landscapes and social change in south-central Cyprus during the Late Bronze Age (c. 1700-1100 BCE). He will focus mainly on Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, a city that flourished in the 13th century BCE, where earlier excavations revealed wealthy tombs, monumental buildings and industrial-scale olive oil production. There, excavations by a UBC-led team are revealing fascinating new evidence for ritual activity and monumental construction in the administrative and economic core of the city. He will contrast these findings with evidence from the contemporaneous urban centre of Maroni, about 7 km away, where his project is revealing a rather different story of urban development.
Kevin D. Fisher is Associate Professor of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is an anthropological archaeologist interested in the relationship between people and their built environments, urbanism and the social dynamics of ancient cities, and the application of digital technologies for recording, analyzing and visualizing archaeological phenomena.
Dr. Fisher received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto (2007) and has since held postdoctoral fellowships at Cornell University, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University, the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas, and with the Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (CRANE) Project at the University of Toronto.
His research focuses mainly on the early complex societies of the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, especially Cyprus, although he has worked on projects in Greece, Jordan, Peru, Guatemala, the US and Canada. He is currently Co-director of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project, an investigation of the relationship between urban landscapes, interaction and social change in Late Bronze Age Cyprus (c. 1700-1100 BCE)
The ‘discovery’ of Aegean prehistory in the late 19th century was instrumental in shaping several dominant and interrelated discourses, including when the origins of ‘Greek’ civilization should be placed, the ‘race(s)’ of the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece, and the relationship of these races to later Greeks (both of the Classical period, and modern populations). This talk traces the entanglements between the development of archaeological methodologies, racialized understandings of culture, and cultural evolutionism that informed research agendas regarding the above questions, especially in Anglo-American scholarship, well into the mid-20th century. It also considers implications for the treatment of the Late Bronze Age – Early Iron Age transition and legacies of racialized narratives into the present.
Anne Duray (Ph.D. Stanford 2020) is a Visiting Researcher and Lecturer a University of Colorado Boulder. She studies the intellectual and methodological histories of archaeology in their social, political, and cultural contexts. Her monograph project (tentatively titled Hellenism, Archaeological Practice, and the Creation of Cultural Continuity) explores how entanglements between understandings of race, culture, and language have not only shaped (and been shaped by) archaeological practices but also influenced narratives of cultural continuity and discontinuity in Greek archaeology, especially in the case of the Bronze Age – Iron Age transition. She is also working on several articles that examine intersections between Aegean prehistory and race science during the late 19th – early 20th centuries, and Athenian topography in Aristophanes’ Knights. She has excavated at numerous sites in Greece, including the Athenian Agora, Malthi, and Stelida, and is the Editorial Assistant for the American Journal of Archaeology.
Emily Booker, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her dissertation, “Contextual Clay Bodies: Figurine Use and Meaning in Late Bronze Age Cyprus,” in a public lecture. All are welcome.
A fundamental dimension of divine essence in ancient Mediterranean beliefs is the radiance of divine beings. How was it experienced in ritual practice? And how did space, natural or artificial, condition modes of interaction with the divine?
Athanasios Papalexandrou is Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD from Princeton University focusing on the ritual dimensions of Early Greek figurative art. Prior to teaching at The University of Texas at Austin, he taught at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and spent the 2001–02 academic year as a research fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC. His first book, The Visual Poetics of Power: Warriors, Youths, and Tripods in Early Greece, was published in 2005. In 2021 he published a book titled Bronze Monsters and the Cultures of Wonder: Griffin Cauldrons in the Preclassical Mediterranean (University of Texas Press).
RSVP is strongly encouraged, but not required.
This lecture is a part of The History of Art & Architecture’s 23-24 Lecture Series: Light in Theory & Practice, which is a part of the Brown Arts IGNITE series.
Art surrounds us, every day, in every way. It is entangled in the mundane and the exceptional. The act of creation, in all its many forms, is art. Explore how the reclamation and preservation of tradition can help us see the art around us and appreciate the art within us.
Join the Haffenreffer Museum for our annual program of Gather. Make. Sustain: a series of workshops, artist talks, and demonstrations featuring Indigenous artists who work in a variety of mediums. Learn how these artists create environmentally and culturally sustainable artwork, as well as maintain traditional knowledge systems through the act of gathering materials and stories.
Silvermoon LaRose is a member of the Narragansett Tribe and the assistant director of the Tomaquag Museum. She has worked in tribal communities for over 20 years, serving in the areas of health and human services, education and humanities. As a public servant, Silvermoon serves on the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and as the secretary for the Charlestown Conservation Commission. Additionally, she is the vice chair for the Avenue Concept supporting local public art ecosystems. As an artist and educator, she hopes to foster Indigenous empowerment through education, community building and the sharing of cultural knowledge and traditional arts. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, a minor in Justice Law and Society from the University of Rhode Island and a partially completed Master’s in Rehabilitation Counseling from Western Washington University.
Light refreshments to follow.
Free and open to the public.
Supported by generous donors to the Barbara Greenwald Memorial Arts Program fund.
The Brown Department of Classics cordially invites you to attend a lecture by Professor Vassiliki Panoussi Professor of Classical Studies, College of William and Mary.
This presentation will focus on the depiction of the goddess Isis in Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The two authors seem to exploit her gender and ethnic identity to strengthen oppositions between male and female, Roman and foreign, victor and victim, establishing a Roman hegemonic narrative. However, the texts’ embracing of Isis’ Greek counterpart Io as champion of the defeated tells a different story about the clarity of these distinctions in Augustan Rome.
This lecture is free and open to the public, reception to follow. We look forward to seeing you there!
Rocco Palermo, Assistant Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, examines human-environment interactions in global empires, with a focus on South-West Asia from the Iron Age to the Roman period. Since 2022 he has served as the Director of the Girdi Matrab Archaeological Project (GMAP) in the plain of Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan. He is the author of On the Edge of Empires: North Mesopotamia during the Roman Period.
Kirie Stromberg, a Postdoctoral Associate in Yale University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, will discuss her research in an informal talk titled, “From Musicking to Governance: Dōtaku Bronze Bells of Japan’s Yayoi Period (ca. 800 BC-250 AD)”.
For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/
Using ceramics from first millennium northwest Argentina that feature humanoid, zoomorphic, and phytomorphic forms, Dr. Benjamin Alberti, Professor of Anthropology at Framingham State University, will explore some theoretical and methodological starting points to the many questions about these unusual objects, drawing upon theories from both Western and non-Western traditions.
Francesco Giuliano – a Visiting Research Fellow at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and doctoral student at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale in Naples, Italy – will discuss his research in an informal talk titled, “The Aeolian Archipelago During the Greek and Roman Ages (6th c. BC - 5th c. AD): Written Sources, Landscapes, and Field Survey Archaeology”.
For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/
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.
Learn to produce technical illustrations! Handle ancient objects close up!
Casual atmosphere, no experience or artistic confidence necessary! Drop in any time. Bring your lunch, if you’d like!