CRASIS

09/09/2024

It is our pleasure to announce the next Ancient World Seminar, which will be held on Tuesday September 17th. Professor Thomas Harrison, Keeper at the British Museum, will give a lecture on:

"Herodotus’ ‘Reception’ of the Persian Wars"

The lecture will be held at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38), Court Room, from 16:15-17:30.

After the seminar, we invite you to join us for free drinks, no registration required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

Additionally, we will be announcing the winners of the CRASIS BA Thesis Prize 2024 during the event.

Abstract
Like his younger contemporary Thucydides, Herodotus has long been so closely associated with the wars that form the central topic of his Histories that we may easily be seduced into imagining features of his work to be inevitable. This paper attempts the thought-experiment of examining the Histories not so much as a work of history-writing but as a work of reception. Sketching a range of distinctive Herodotean choices—in style, scope, and patterning—and re-examining the ways in which the Histories relate to Herodotus’ own time, the paper seeks to reassert the distance between author and event.

About the speaker
Thomas Harrison is Keeper of the Department of Greece and Rome at the British Museum. Previously Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews, Thomas has broad interests in the history of the archaic and classical Greek and Persian worlds, and in the history of scholarship in these areas. His research has focussed on the reconstruction of past visions: the ways in which the Greeks understood and interacted with foreign peoples, how they understood the role of the divine in ordinary life, or the complex thought-worlds of scholars of antiquity from the nineteenth century through to today.

We hope to see you there!

16/06/2024

On behalf of CRASIS and the Mortuary Ritual Network, we would like to invite you to the Ancient World Seminar of 18 June, where Leonard Rutgers (University of Utrecht) will give a lecture on:

‘The Third Revolution in Archaeology: aDNA in Ancient and Medieval Jewish Archaeology.’

More information, including an abstract will follow shortly.

Afterwards, there will be free drinks for anyone interested for which no registration is required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

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CRASIS Coffee
We would also like to remind you of that the 'CRASIS Coffee' will be held this Friday 14 June at 11:00 in the Academy Building, C-bar on the ground-floor.

Everyone is welcome to have a cup of coffee together, discuss the Ancient World Seminars, personal research or just to catch up! CRASIS will provide snacks. Make sure to bring your own coffee mug!

We hope to see you there!

12/05/2024

We would like to invite you to the Ancient World Seminar of 14 May where Niki Kasumi Clements (Rice University) will give a lecture on:

"What Foucault Learnt from Late Ancient Christianity"

The lecture will be held at the Faculty of Religion Culture and Society, Oude Boteringestraat Straat 38. Please note that the lecture is not in the Court Room, but in Room 253 at 16:15 to 17:15.

Abstract:

This CRASIS talk will explore the relationship between s*xuality and early Christian monasticism. Over the last decade of his life, Michel Foucault drafts and redrafts his History of Sexuality series. And between 1974 and 1984, he becomes increasingly invested in late ancient and then ancient discourses on s*xual ethics. The 2018 posthumous publication of History of Sexuality: Volume 4, Les aveux de la chair, leaves us with no doubt as to the importance of late ancient askesis and spiritual direction in his "s*x series." So what did Foucault learn from late antiquity? How did he come to engage the work of the monk and theologian John Cassian as a particular site for understanding modern confessional subjection? And how does he end up extolling virginity as an art of living in the church father Gregory of Nyssa? In this talk, I will stage how Foucault transformed his s*x series into an inquiry into ethics through the fulcrum of late ancient Christianity.

Afterwards, there will be free drinks for anyone interested for which no registration is required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

05/04/2024

CRASIS would like to invite you to the Ancient World Seminar of 16 April where dr. Marlena Whiting (University of Groningen) will give a lecture on:

‘Travel in the Late Antique Near East: Conceptions of Space and Distance’

Abstract
Human movement through space - navigation, orientation - is as much a mental process as it is a physical one. Scholars have traditionally tended to apply one of two models to perceptions of space and travel in antiquity: the hodological (path-based) or the cartographic (map-based). However, new approaches reject this binary, instead combining approaches from linguistics, cognitive science, and computer programming in a “Common Sense Geography”. This has a dual connotation of “common sense” as reflecting an unintellectual, practical knowledge, and “common” as alluding to a shared knowledge derived from common cultural reference points. It is particularly appropriate for understanding the development of Christian long-distance Holy Land pilgrimage and explaining how travellers unfamiliar with the region organized and experienced their journeys. In this paper I will look at testimony of journeys in the 4ᵗʰ-7ᵗʰ c. Near East for evidence of “common sense” approaches to planning and executing long-distance journeys, including itineraries, maps and first-hand travel accounts, and advocate new concepts for describing the experience of travel in late antiquity.

About the speaker
Marlena Whiting is a Researcher and Lecturer in Ancient History at University of Groningen. Her expertise includes urbanism, built environment, lived religion, pilgrimage, travel, networks, epigraphy, gender, Late Antiquity, Anchoring Innovation.

See the poster below for more information!

06/03/2024

CRASIS invites you to our next Ancient World Seminar on 19 March, where Dr. Mario Baumann (University of Dresden) will give a lecture on:

“Follow Your Nose: The Representation of Smells in Ancient Greek Literature”

The lecture will be held at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38), Court Room, at 16:15-17:30.

Afterwards, there will be free drinks for anyone interested for which no registration is required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

Abstract

Smell occupies a kind of middle position among our senses: on the one hand, smell perception can occur over some distance and is therefore different from the “close-up senses” of taste and touch; on the other hand, smelling requires a more direct contact with the object of perception than the senses of seeing and hearing. In a similar vein, the close connection of the sense of smell with memory and emotions goes hand in hand with the notorious difficulty of putting olfactory impressions into words. My talk shows how ancient Greek literature took up these ambivalent properties of the sense of smell in order to achieve strong and often surprising effects on its audience. At the same time, my presentation invites the listeners to a journey through text spaces and worlds of scent, which will take us from Athens to “Happy Arabia” and the Islands of the Blest.

About the speaker

Mario Baumann is Junior Professor of Ancient Cultures and Greek Literature at the Technical University Dresden. He is the author of Bilder schreiben: Virtuose Ekphrasis in Philostrats Eikones (De Gruyter, 2011) and Welt erzählen: Narration und das Vergnügen des Lesers in der ersten Pentade von Diodors Bibliotheke (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020). His research interests are in Greek historiography, narratology, and the senses in ancient literature. He has led a research project, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), on Herodian’s History of the Empire from the Death of Marcus and has recently been awarded a DFG grant for a project on the representation of smells in ancient Greek literature.

Crasis Coffee

We would like to remind you that the 'CRASIS Coffee' will be held this Friday 8 March, at 11:00 in the Academy Building, C-bar on the ground-floor. Everyone is welcome to have a cup of coffee together, discuss the Ancient World Seminars, personal research or just to catch up! CRASIS will provide snacks. Make sure to bring your own coffee mug!

We hope to see you there!

01/02/2024

It is our pleasure to announce that registration is now possible for the CRASIS Annual Meeting 2024 on Between Image and Text. The Annual Meeting takes place on Friday 16 February at the University of Groningen. The event is designed to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas about the ancient world across traditional disciplinary boundaries. All are very welcome!

Each year, an internationally acknowledged expert in one of the fields represented by CRASIS is invited to deliver the CRASIS Keynote Lecture at the Annual Meeting.

This year we are honoured to welcome Prof. Jás Elsner (Oxford University) as keynote speaker and he will be speaking on:

‘Presence, Absence and the Problems of Comparativity: Archaeological Art History and the Imaginative Restoration of the Lost’

The Annual Meeting will take place in the Court Room of the Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38). You can register for the Annual Meeting via this form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfDGfC_m03LnV-vzN5f06zpQxXePFsb-fwDKsBmcmT_K-8gPw/viewform

The deadline for registration is Monday 12 February.

For more information, keep an eye on our website (https://www.rug.nl/research/centre-for-religious-studies/research-centres/crasis/). For questions, you can reach us at [email protected].

12/01/2024

We would like to invite you to the Ancient World Seminar of 16 January where Prof. Azzan Yadin-Israel (Rutgers University) will give a lecture on:

"How the Forbidden Fruit Became an Apple: Interpretation, Iconography, and Linguistics."

The lecture will be held at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38), Court Room, at 16:15-17:30.

Afterwards, there will be free drinks for anyone interested for which no registration is required. If you would like to join the dinner after the drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

Abstract
How did the apple, unmentioned by the Bible, become the dominant symbol of temptation, sin, and the Fall? This talk pursues this mystery across art and religious history, uncovering where, when, and why the forbidden fruit became an apple. Though scholars often blame theologians for the apple, accounts of the Fall written in commonly spoken languages—French, German, and English—influenced a broader audience than cloistered Latin commentators. As the talk will demonstrate, Eden’s fruit, once thought to be a fig or a grape, first appears as an apple in twelfth-century French art, due to shifts in vernacular accounts of the Fall of Man. A wide-ranging discussion of early Christian thought, Renaissance art, and medieval languages, that transforms our historical understanding of a central religious icon.

About the speaker
Azzan Yadin-Israel is Professor of Jewish Studies and Classics at Rutgers University. His research interests are concerned with Plato, the Presocratics, classical rabbinic literature and he is the author of several works, including:The Grace of God and the Grace of Man: The Theologies of Bruce Springsteen.

Crasis Coffee
We would also like to remind you that the 'CRASIS Coffee' will be held this Friday 12 January, at 11:00 in the Academy Building, C-bar on the ground-floor.

Everyone is welcome to have a cup of coffee together, discuss the Ancient World Seminars, personal research or just to catch up! CRASIS will provide snacks.

We hope to see you there!

27/11/2023

REMINDER:

CRASIS invites applications for its thirteenth Annual Meeting and Masterclass, which will take place on 15 (Masterclass) and 16 (Annual Meeting) February 2024 at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The Annual Meeting and Masterclass is a two-day event, designed to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas about the ancient world across traditional disciplinary boundaries among graduate students, postdocs, and established scholars. Each year, an internationally acknowledged expert in one of the fields represented by CRASIS is invited to give a masterclass for (Research) MA and PhD students and to deliver the CRASIS Keynote Lecture at the Annual Meeting.

We are honoured to welcome Prof. Jaś Elsner (Oxford University) who will teach the masterclass and deliver the keynote lecture at the Annual Meeting. The overall theme of the 2024 Masterclass and Annual Meeting will be:

‘Between Image and Text’

How do we integrate textual, visual, and material sources in the study of the ancient world? We invite participants to reflect on the boundaries between the written and the depicted, to discuss the advantages and methodological complications of engaging with disparate sources, and to consider the impact of research methods and questions on our understanding of words and things. We welcome contributions from various disciplines and subfields in the study of Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity, from archaeology to art history, and from literature to epigraphy in the languages of the region.

PhD and Research Master students are invited to submit a proposal of a topic (500 words) for the Masterclass (15 February 2024), explaining how their own research relates to the theme. Senior (post-PhD) researchers are invited to submit a title and abstract (250 words) for a lecture at the Annual Meeting (16 February 2024).



Deadline for Proposals

Proposals accompanied by a short CV or bio must be submitted no later than December 1 (2023) via [email protected]. If possible, CRASIS will contribute to travel and accommodation costs of graduate students, up to a limit of €200 for participants from outside the Netherlands, and up to €100 for participants from the Netherlands.

For the full Call for Papers and further particulars, see our website: https://www.rug.nl/research/centre-for-religious-studies/research-centres/crasis/research-teaching/annual-meeting/ Any queries can be addressed to the CRASIS secretary Sylvia Buiter at [email protected].

Crasis Annual Meeting and Masterclass

14/11/2023

We would like to invite you to the Ancient World Seminar of 21 November where Prof. Miguel John Versluys (Leiden University) will give a lecture on:

"Innovating Objects. Global Rome and the making of Empire (250 BCE – 14 CE)"

The lecture will be held at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38), Court Room, at 16:15-17:30.

Afterwards, there will be free drinks for anyone interested for which no registration is required. If you would like to join the dinner after drinks, please register by sending an email to [email protected]

Abstract
Almost all histories of the rise of Rome in the final two centuries BCE are histories of imperialism in our modern understanding of that concept. In my lecture I would like to explore a different perspective on ‘the rise of Rome’ as it took shape in the Late Republic. To do so I will try and understand Roman imperialism as part of a much larger process of increasing complex connectivity, or Globalisation, that characterized Afro- Eurasia in this particular period, from the Atlantic to the Chinese Sea. My hypothesis is that Rome rides the waves of change brought about by this Globalisation process remarkably well and that it is this characteristic, its ability to embed global diversity, that should play a defining role with explaining the making of Empire. Objects will prove to play a remarkable (and heavily underexplored) role as part of this new perspective.

About the speaker
Prof. Miguel John Versluys is Director of the Graduate School of Archaeology at Leiden University and Professor of Classical & Mediterranean Archaeology. Miguel John is one of the six coordinators of the research programme Anchoring Innovation , awarded with a Gravitation Fund of NWO.

His research has two focus points:

- the interconnection of cultures and their various identities (”Globalisation”); and
- the interdependence of objects and people (“Material Culture Studies”)

We hope to see you there!

23/10/2023

Also interesting for many of those involved with and interested in CRASIS: the deadline to send in an abstract for issue 71 of the Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie is one week out!

Tijdschrift voor Mediterrane Archeologie (TMA) invites beginning and senior scholars to submit abstracts for an article in its 71st issue!

We welcome contributions ranging from case studies to theoretical approaches related to the archaeology of the Mediterranean world in its broadest sense. Research with a historical or epigraphic approach can also be admitted.

Deadline abstracts: 30 October 2023
Deadline article: 31 January 2024
Publication TMA 71: summer 2024
Full call on our website: https://tijdschrift.mediterrane-archeologie.nl/welcome/
Full call on Academia: https://www.academia.edu/106546632/Call_for_Papers_TMA71_English_and_Dutch_