The Roman emperor Jovian (363-364) only ruled for eight months and has not received much attention in scholarship. However, he is more than a footnote in history. After the reign of Julian, he returned to the policies of Constantius II and Constantine the Great. His...
“Voices of Ancient Palmyra” began as an online public humanities project that explored how different publics engaged with ancient history and the destruction of ancient objects. The original goal was to encourage people of all ages and education levels to artistically rewrite words from ancient...
Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imhotep (Imuthes), ca. 332-200 B.C. From the poetry of Sappho to the New Testament, texts written on papyrus have been preserved for millennia by arid conditions in Egypt, excavated, and collected in archives. This timely colloquium examines...
This paper explores activities of cleaning and disposing because they represent key principles of social organization. Close attention to discard behavior helps us to understand how people related to the material goods and places that once made up their object worlds – their material habitus...
We live in a world of maps and networks. GPS enabled phones allow us to instantly locate ourselves on the earth’s surface, guide us to stores or restaurants, or announce to the world our location through social media. Likewise, programs like Google Earth and desktop...
Rita Lucarelli (Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley) Monday, June 5, 2017 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB In this lecture the character of the ancient Egyptian magical practices, with a special focus on the role that demons played in magical texts and images, will be thoroughly...
Amelia R. Brown (Greek History & Language, University of Queensland) Monday, April 24, 2017 /4:00 PM HSSB 4041 The ancient Greeks were never politically unified before the rise of Rome, yet they succeeded in developing and maintaining a common culture all around the Mediterranean coasts ‘like frogs around...
Cavan Concannon (Religion,University of Southern California) Friday, October 28, 2016/12:00 PM HSSB 4080 Modern historians map the diversity of early Christianity in a variety of ways, from declines into heresy to competition among “varieties” of early Christianities. Drawing particularly on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze...
Keynote Speaker: Christine Shepardson (Religious Studies, University of Tennessee at Knoxville) Friday, March 11 – Sunday, March 13, 2016 / 4:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6046 HSSB Borderlands are spaces where people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, political systems, or linguistic traditions come into contact, often...
Karen Radner (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität-München, Munich) Monday, October 5, 2015 / 5:00 PM HSSB 6020 Ancient Near Eastern history specialist Karen Radner sets her research sights on the big picture. She is one of the world’s leading experts on the history of Mesopotamia at the time of the...
Katherine Strange Burke (Archaeology,Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) Friday, May 15 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4080 The political transition from Egyptian to Frankish rule at the Mediterranean port of Jaffa at the turn of the twelfth century CE was abrupt. But the ceramic record illustrates...
Jodi Magness (Religious Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Friday, March 13 / 11:30-1:00 AM HSSB 4020 Since 2011, Professor Jodi Magness has been directing excavations in the ancient village of Huqoq in Israel's Galilee. The excavations have brought to light the remains of a monumental Late...
Steven Fine (History, Yeshiva University) Monday, January 26 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Since antiquity, scholars have almost universally -- and correctly — interpreted the menorah bearers of the Arch of Titus spoils panel as triumphal Romans celebrating the defeat of the Jews in the...
Jean-Yves Marc (Université de Strassbourg) Wednesday, November 19, 2014 / 6:00 PM HSSB 4080 The Forum at Philippi was not built on the site of the city’s Hellenistic Agora. Rather, the Forum was built as an entirely new project in the Roman imperial period. At the height of...
Friday, April 4-Sunday, April 6 McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020 Borderlands, broadly defined, are spaces where disparate ethnicities, cultures, religions, political systems, or linguistic traditions come into close contact and require both individuals and societies to adapt culturally, politically, economically, or technologically to encounters with other...
Elspeth Dusinberre (Classics, University of Colorado - Boulder) Friday, November 1 / 6:00 PM Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History 2559 Puesta del Sol The Achaemenid Persian Empire (ca. 550-330 BCE) stretched over thousands of miles and encompassed many different cultures. Thanks to textual, visual, and archaeological...
Giorgio Miescher (University of Basel, Switzerland) Friday, October 11 / 12:00 PM 4080 HSSB The Red Line is a massive fence that stretches over 1,000 kilometers across Namibia and separates this southwest African country into two parts. This fence, constructed by South Africa in the 1960s, stands for...
James Walters (Theology, Boston University) Monday, May 6 / 4:30 PM HSSB 4041 In addition to evidence for household cults in the terrace houses at Ephesus, three of the units contained installations for cultic activities that "blur" the traditional distinction between public and private space. The likely identification...
Faculty and Staff Harry Munt, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford) Patrick Ryan Williams, Associate Curator and Anthropology Chair, The Field Museum of Chicago Fikret Yegül, Art History Gregory Wilson, Anthropology Voula Tsouna, Philosophy Samuel Thomas, Religion, California Lutheran Christine Thomas, Religious Studies Paul Spickard, History Stuart Tyson Smith, Anthropology Jo-Ann Shelton, Classics Helen Rhee,...
Jacques Perreault (Classics, Université de Montreal) Friday, November 16 / 5:30 PM Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Pottery production increased greatly during the Archaic period in the Greek world and we know of many different styles and production centers. On the northern Aegean island of Thasos, a...
Steven Friesen (Religious Studies, University of Texas Austin) Thursday, October 11 / 6:00 PM McCune Conference Center, 6020 HSSB The recent work of Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek on the New Testament suggests that Žižek may have more in common with the author of the Book of Revelation. Žižek’s work may...
People • Past Events • Ph.D. Emphasis Program • Contact us For information about the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program please visit www.ams.ucsb.edu *Map of HSSB Registering for the Core Seminar for Credit Interested graduate students can receive 2 credits per quarter for attending the meetings by registering for the...
Leslie Wallace (History of Art & Architecture, University of Pittsburgh) Friday, May 20 / 4:00 PM HSSB 3041 At the height of Han expansion, the northern frontier of the Han Empire stretched from northern Korea in the east to the Tengger Desert in the west and onward into...
Monday, May 2 / 9:00 AM - 4:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Traditional research on borders and frontiers has typically emphasized the divisive influence of “hard” boundaries imposed by geography, politics, and economics. This conference seeks to widen the narrow conceptions of space underlying traditional...
Felipe Rojas (Getty Postdoctoral Fellow) Wednesday, April 6 / 5:00 PM HSSB 4041 Felipe's research examines the re-use of Lydian landscapes, monuments, and objects at Sardis in the Roman period. He is a 2011-2012 postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Villa. Sponsored by the IHC’s Ancient Borderlands RFG....
Michael D. Dixon (History, University of Southern Indiana) Monday, March 7 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4041 Corinth, like many Greek poleis ("city-states"), did not enjoy full autonomy and freedom during the Hellenistic period. Between the battles of Chaironeia (338 BC) and Cynoscephalae (197 BC), Corinth was almost continuously...
Elizabeth Clark (Religion / History, Duke University) Monday, February 14 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4041 In recent centuries, many have assumed that marriage, family, and home were normative Christian ideals. Nineteenth-century notions of domesticity and twentieth-century praise of “family values” encouraged the view that Christianity supported a pro-family...
Ronald Stroud (Classical Languages and Literature, UC Berkeley) Tuesday, February 8 / 5:30 PM SB Museum of Natural History Located at the narrowest part of the Greek peninsula, Corinth became famous as one of the greatest commercial centers in the ancient world. From early times Corinth also had a...
David Phillips (History, UCLA) Monday, January 31 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4041 Professor Phillips' talk examines some characteristic problems and issues in the study of Athenian law, and of ancient Greek law more generally, through an analysis of the offense of hubris ("intentionally dishonoring behavior"). In addition to...
John G. Younger (Classics, University of Kansas) Friday, January 21 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4041 Professor Younger's talk examines the lives of girls and women in the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the prehistoric Aegean (ca. 3000-1000 BCE). Testing modern assumptions and expectations against the archaeological, iconographic, and...
Monday-Friday, November 1-5 Gonda van Steen’s first book, Venom in Verse: Aristophanes in Modern Greece was awarded the John D. Criticos Prize from the London Hellenic Society. She recently finished a book titled Liberating Hellenism from the Ottoman Empire (2010), in which revolutionary uses of Aeschylus’...
Stanley Burstein (History, CSU Los Angeles) Monday, October 18 / 12:00 PM HSSB 4041 The establishment of direct sea contact between the Mediterranean and South Asia in the first century CE is one of the most remarkable developments in ancient history. Scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on the impact...
L. Michael White (Classics, University of Texas at Austin) Thursday, May 20 / 3:30 PM Phelps 1160 L. Michael White is a Professor of Classics at The University of Texas at Austin and the Ronald Nelson Smith Chair in Christian Origins. White also serves as director of the...
The Second Biannual Ancient Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference Friday, April 16 / 1:00 - 6:00 pm Saturday, April 17 / 8:30 am - 4:15 pm Sunday, April 18 / 8:30 am – 2:00 pm McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB BORDERLANDS: frontier zones lying along given boundaries,...