Research News
Please find out about the most recent developments in our research:
New Publications by Classics Staff
The Department is delighted to welcome the three most recent additions to its Faculty bookshelf by Arietta Papaconstantinou, Amy Smith, and Tim Duff:
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Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou published a co-edited conference volume 'Le Proche-Orient de Justinien aux Abbassides'. This volume is the result of a conference held in Paris with the aim of exploring the impact of the seventh-century Arab conquests on population and settlement in the Near East and Egypt. The transfer of sovereignty from Byzantium to the Caliphate brought some obvious geo-political changes, which in the long term signalled the decline of some cities or regions, which had lost their hinterlands, and the rise of others which were much more strategically placed than before. The contributions in the volume build on thirty years of extremely fruitful archaeological investigations in the area, and paint an exciting new picture of a major transition, which shaped the wider Mediterranean world as we know it |
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The latest volume of the international series Pallas (vol. 86), published by the Presses Universitaires du Mirail, University of Toulouse, has been devoted to The Gods of Small Things, a volume that presents select articles from the international conference by the same name hosted by the Ure Museum and the Department of Classics at University of Reading in September 2009. The volume was edited by Dr. Amy Smith, Curator of the Ure Museum and Senior Lecturer in Classics at Reading, and Dr. Marianne Bergeron, who completed her PhD in Classics at Reading in 2010 and is now Project Curator in the Naukratis Project at the British Museum. Smith and Bergeron, along with Katerina Volioti, a current PhD candidate in Classics at Reading, co-organised the 2009 conference on the Gods of Small Things. Bergeron and Volioti have contributed articles to this volume as has Nick West, who has also just this term defended his PhD thesis at Reading. This volume investigates small and portable objects-small pots, figurines, loomweights, even shells-that functioned in a variety of non-commercial contexts in antiquity. Such objects are often fragmentary and/or overlooked, even by excavators. These items and assemblages, whether or not used as offerings, also inform us about the relationships between humans, their ancestors and gods. |
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Dr Tim Duff has published a substantially revised and annotated translation of Plutarch's Lives illustrating 'The Age of Alexander' in the world-famous Penguin series. |
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Funding Success for Prof. emeritus Tessa Rajak
Prof. Tessa Rajak (Reading/Oxford) was successful as Co-Investigator in a joint funding bid with Prof. Martin Goodman (Oxford, PI) and Dr Andrea Schatz (KCL, Co-I). Their AHRC grant of £139k will run from 2012-15:
The Reception of Josephus in Jewish Culture from the 18th Century to the Present
Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest from Jerusalem who took part in the war against Rome in 66 CE until he was captured and, inspired (so he said) by divine guidance, changed to the Roman side and devoted his retirement in Rome to writing about the history and customs of the Jews.
The focus of this multidisciplinary research project will be on the way Jews in the last 250 years have built on earlier Jewish and Christian uses of the writings of Josephus for a variety of very different purposes. Josephus' writings were not acknowledged in the Jewish tradition preserved by the rabbis in Hebrew and Aramaic in late antiquity, and the survival of his works is due entirely to the value ascribed to them by early Christians. The project will investigate the attitudes to these writings and to Josephus as an individual to be found among Jews from the 18th century to the present.
The historian Flavius Josephus has given both religions their basic understanding of their own historical origins. He provides most of our knowledge of the period in which both Judaism and Christianity took shape, providing the only documentation of many momentous events, above all the detailed narrative of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, which determined the fate of three religions. Here too lie the roots of their conflict. Myth and reality have become inseparable in this extremely sensitive area. Josephus lies at the heart of Europe's formation. As a Jewish author whose writings were adopted and for many centuries transmitted and exploited by the Church, Josephus has been received and read in many different ways. For centuries, he was a shaper of Christianity. But, especially in the modern period, Jews have revalorized this part of their heritage, and conferred new significance and new meanings on the material, which became intertwined with their own progress into modernity. To reflect on this extraordinary multiplicity of treasured and highly influential readings of the same text is to come close to getting inside the mindset of the 'other', relinquishing dogmatism, and achieving real tolerance. Josephus records a multi-ethnic world and speaks for the first diaspora in western history as an insider, illuminating problems of co-existence that are acute today, and even offering remedies.
At the same time, the project will take its place in the fast-growing and lively field of reception studies of Classical authors. An appreciation is growing among Classicists that Josephus belongs to the canon of Greek historians as well as being a Jewish writer, an awareness that has advantageously widened the horizons of Classics as a discipline and helped to temper old tendencies to Hellenocentricity.
Communicating our research abroad: Dr Annalisa Marzano lectures in Tarragona (Spain)
As part of the new Erasmus teaching exchange established last year with the Institut Català d'Arqueologia Clàssica (ICAC) in Tarragona (Spain), Dr Annalisa Marzano gave a series of MA lectures at ICAC to students enrolled on the Classical Archaeology and Ancient History programme.
Dr Marzano's four lectures on villas, settlement, and society in ancient central Italy featured as part of the intensive 8th International Seminar in Classical Archaeology (Jan. 31 - Feb. 1, 2012) devoted to Rural Settlements and the Transformation of the Landscape in Antiquity. The teaching programme featured also lectures on landscape archaeology, topography, palaeobotany, etc. given by researchers and professors from various Spanish universities and museums.
Dr Marzano had several meetings with colleagues from ICAC and other Spanish universities to explore new, or enhance existing, exchanges and research networks, especially for postgraduate students.
In May 2012 Dr Jesús Carruesco from ICAC will be visiting Reading under the Erasmus staff exchange scheme. Dr Carruesco's research covers a wide range of topics spanning from Philology to Cultural Anthropology of the Ancient World. His main area of expertise is Archaic and Classical Greece, with a special focus on religion and modes of performance (social, ritual, and literary). We look forward to hearing his seminars in the spring!
Please follow this link for an Interview with Dr Marzano on the ICAC webpages.
Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network Holds Workshop at Reading
The Legacy of Greek Political Thought Network held an international research workshop at the University of Reading, 2-3 December 2011.
The Network is open to anyone whose research includes the many ways in which the political thought of ancient Greece has been represented, deployed, challenged or creatively transformed in subsequent cultures. For this workshop, generously funded by the British Academy, the rubric was to investigate lesser-known such transformations. Accordingly we investigated such diverse objects as Lutheran pacifists, German film-makers, democratic or anti-democratic theorists of various periods, and the military career of Socrates. Each panel generated substantial discussion and we were thus very grateful to the Departments of Classics, Politics and History, who provided frequent tea-breaks.
The workshop concluded with plans to meet again in Bristol next year, and to undertake a special issue of the Classical Receptions Journal. The Network would like to thank all the speakers, delegates, funding bodies, and office staff involved.
New Monograph by Prof. Barbara Goff and Dr Michael Simpson
Thinking the Olympics: the classical tradition and the modern Games (London: Bloomsbury/Bristol Classical Press, 2011) is the first book to focus on the theme of tradition as an integral feature of the ancient and modern Olympic Games. Just as ancient athletes and spectators were conscious of Olympic traditions of poetic praise, sporting achievement, and catastrophic shortcoming, so the revived Games have been consistently cast as a legacy of ancient Greece. The essays here examine how this supposed inheritance has been engineered, celebrated, exploited, or challenged. Deriving from a range of disciplines including cultural history, classics, comparative literature, and art history, the essays address aspects of the Games as varied as oratory, praise poetry, ideas of victory and defeat, the athletic body, neoclassical painting and architecture, and contemporary advertising. The Athens Games in 2004 were widely represented as a return to ancient, and modern, origins; the Beijing Games in 2008, meanwhile, saluted a radically different ancient civilisation. What is the Olympic future for ancient Greece?
Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson have collaborated on several ground-breaking works on classical reception, including most prominently Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone and dramas of the African diaspora (Oxford: OUP, 2007) and most recently 'Voice from the Black Box: Sylvain Bemba's Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone', in Helene Foley and Erin Mee ed., Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford: OUP, 2011). They are currently working on a study of classics in the British Labour movement.
New Monograph by Dr Emma Aston
We are delighted to see the publication of Dr Emma Aston's monograph 'Mixanthrôpoi'. Emma's book examines an under-explored aspect of Greek religion: gods and goddesses depicted in half-human, half-animal form. Many of the beings discussed - Cheiron, Pan, Acheloos, the Sirens and others - will be familiar from the narratives of Greek mythology, in which fabulous anatomies abound. However, they have never previously been studied together from a religious perspective, as recipients of cult and as members of the ancient pantheon. This book is the first major treatment of the use of part-animal - mixanthropic - form in the representation and visual imagination of Greek gods and goddesses, and of its significance with regard to divine character and function. What did it mean to depict deities in a form so strongly associated in the ancient imagination with monstrous adversaries? How did iconography, myth and ritual interact in particular sites of worship? Drawing together literary and visual material, this study establishes the themes dominant in the worship of divine mixanthropes, and argues that, so far from being insignificant curiosities, they make possible a greater understanding of the fabric of ancient religious practice, in particular the tense and challenging relationship between divinity and visual representation.
Encountering the Divine - Another Successful International Conference at Reading
On September 1st-3rd, the Classics Department held an international conference entitled 'Encountering the Divine: Between Gods and Men in the Ancient World', organised by Dr Susanne Turner and Alastair Harden. Speakers and delegates alike agreed it was a huge success!
We welcomed twenty-eight scholars from eight different countries - our furthest travelling speaker joined us from New Zealand - to discuss and debate the ways in which Greek and Roman men and women forged relationships with the gods. The aim was to move beyond the functionalist models which have dominated the way we approach ancient religion. Ritual was an integral part of daily life in the ancient past, but scholarship has often found it much easier to take seriously the ways in which men competed with other men at sanctuaries and festivals, for instance, than it has the very dynamic ways in which those same men constructed and enacted relationships with their gods through the active processes of dedication, prayer and sacrifice (etc...).
The focus of our debate was interdisciplinary: we asked speakers who work on a range of topics (from inscriptions to hymns, from archaeology to historical texts, from philosophical thinking to visual images) to work together to conceptualise human and divine interactions with greater conceptual sophistication. Some speakers explored the metaphorical bridges ancients built between themselves and their gods through the mediating figures (snakes and hybrids, heroes and emperors, daemons and doctors, and even poets and sculptors). Other speakers focused on deconstructing the role of the imagination in reaching out to divine (envisioning them on votives, or encountering them in the landscape) - while still others were imaginatively reconstructing religious feeling and ritual framing (especially in the case of mystery cults!). Some speakers brought together different bits of evidence to explore mortal-divine relationships through the relationships between texts and between objects; others brought their ancient sources into dialogue with modern theories, shining a self-conscious spotlight on our own efforts to articulate the elusive rapports between gods and men.
Our research will ultimately appear as an edited volume, but watch this space for the podcasts!
New Monograph by Dr Amy Smith
We are pleased to announce the publication of Dr Amy Smith's monograph, Polis & Personification in Classical Athenian Art, in Brill's Monumental Graeca et Romana series: http://www.brill.nl/polis-and-personification-classical-athenian-art.
In this book, Dr Smith assesses the development and expansion of the use of personifications in the visual arts of Athens during her golden age (480-323 BCE). Smith's focus on personifications of political relevance, which one finds decorating objects that served either in private roles (e.g. decorated vases) or public roles (e.g. cult statues and document stelai), reveals that these personifications represented aspects of the state of Athens - its people, government, and events - as well as the virtues (e.g. Nemesis, Peitho or Persuasion, and Eirene or Peace) that underpinned it. Athenians used the same figural language to represent foreign places and their peoples in their arts. This is the only comprehensive study of visual personifications as a manifestation of intellectual and political concerns in Athens in the Classical period.
Funding Success for Prof. Peter Kruschwitz
Prof. Peter Kruschwitz has been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant worth £ 4.7k for his project 'Fake Latin: Reassessing Forged Linguistic Data'.
"Luwian Identities" Conference a major success!
On June 10 and 11, 2001, Reading's Classics Department hosted a very successful conference called "Luwian Identities". The "Luwians" were people of ancient Turkey, whose culture or cultures existed from the 2nd millennium BC until the 8th century BC or later. Virtually nothing about them was known until about fifty years ago when scholars began to decipher the strange script ("Hieroglyphic Luwian") that they wrote in, and to understand their language. It now looks as if they were related to the Hittites, and the cultural ancestors of the Lydians, Carians and Lycians who lived in Turkey in the mid 1st millennium BC, but much about them remains uncertain, including whether we should speak in terms of one Luwian culture or several related "Luwic" cultures. One thing we are fairly sure about is that the Mycenaean Greeks were in contact with Luwians in the late 2nd millennium BC, because new archaeological evidence points to Greek presence on the coast of Turkey in Luwian areas. Some scholars have even speculated that the Luwians inhabited the Aegean Sea and mainland Greece before the Greeks themselves arrived. The "Luwian Identities" conference, organised by Alice Mouton of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Ian Rutherford of Reading, was designed to develop a better understanding of just who the Luwians were, and what we mean by the terms "Luwian" and "Luwic". It bought together experts in archaeology, linguistics and religion from twelve countries, including Turkey, Russia and the USA. Some of the papers addressed general questions about Luwian origins, cultural identity, or the territories they occupied, others offered specific studies of texts or archaeological sites. Several speakers looked at aspects of Luwian influence on early Greece. The papers from the conference will appear in an edited volume.
Please follow this link for the dedicated conference webpage: Luwian Identities Conference.
Funding Success for Dr Katherine Harloe
Dr Katherine Harloe has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship worth £24k for her work on the Classicist and Art Historian Johann Winckelmann.
Anatolian and Greek Song - Funding Success
A funding bid to the Canadian Research Council by Professor Annette Teffeteller, on which Professor Ian Rutherford is a co-investigator, has been successful. The award will support research into relations between Anatolian and Greek song in the Classical world. Reading's Classics Department is looking forward to hosting an event in this context.
Professor Barbara Goff awarded British Academy Small Research Grant
Professor Barbara Goff won a British Academy Small Research Grant for the Legacy of Greek Political Thought network. This will be used for a workshop to be held in Autumn 2011. Further information on the LGPT network can be found on The Legacy of Greek Political Thought webpage.
Dr Annalisa Marzano awarded Honourable Mention and Silver Medal for her work on Roman villas
Dr Marzano was awarded a Honorable Mention and a Silver Medal at the VIII Premio Romanistico Internazionale Gérard Boulvert. The award ceremony was held in Rome at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche on November 5, 2010.
The Premio Romanistico Internazionale Gérard Boulvert is held triennially under the auspices of the President of the Italian Republic and supported by the Supreme Court of Italy, the Universities of La Sapienza (Rome) and Federico II (Naples), the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and various foundations. It aims at encouraging the development of research in Roman Law and at recognizing the works of young scholars of all nationalities on topics concerning Roman law and related studies. This year the jury considered 47 monographs published world-wide between 2007 and 2009 and long-listed 20 books. The jury was made of many distinguished international scholars, such as Professors L. Labruna (Federico II, Naples), J. Andreau (EHESS-Paris), L. Capogrossi Colognesi (La Sapienza, Rome), R. Knütel (Universität Bonn), and P. Pichonaz (Université de Fribourg), as well as jurists such as A. Rodger Lord of Earlsferry (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom).
Although her book Roman Villas in Central Italy: A Social and Economic History is not a study in Roman Law, the jury recognized its 'notable scientific quality'. Describing the book as 'a work of great relevance for the study of the villa and the organization and management of the territory' which with an impressive research... presents a very coherent and convincing reconstruction', the twelve jurors unanimously decided to acknowledge Dr Marzano's research with the Honorable Mention and a Silver Medal.