Research seminars - Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology

The Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology is pleased to announce the following programme of research seminars for the current semester.

The CAHA Seminar is the regular research seminar of the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology at Birmingham. Papers typically last 40 minutes and are followed by questions and discussion. Speakers range from our own final-year PhD students to prominent national and international scholars in the range of subject areas (excluding Byzantium) covered by CAHA. Other seminar programmes include those of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies series.

 

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Forthcoming Research seminars will be announced here shortly.

Previous seminars:

2024

4th December - New Directions in Queer and Trans History: Matt Cook and Mo Moulton in Conversation

13th November - The Donkey and The Boat: The Economic Logic of Medieval Societies

10th October - The snake, the magician, and the secret box: stories from ancient Egypt

10th May - Merze Tate, Africa, and the Future of Black Studies

24th April - Speech Difference and Disability Gain in Byzantium, c. 1000-1200

20th March - Ἀλέξανδρος θεοειδὴς (Iliad 3, 16): the gifts of Aphrodite and the meaning of heroism in the third book of the Iliad

13th March - Towards Understanding Contemporary African Diasporas: Bringing Race and Decolonisation In

13th March - A Strategic Approach to Heritage and Wellbeing Policy

13th March - The Meaning of Jewellery in Byzantium: An Archaeological Perspective

6th March - Outsourcing Curiosity: From Cicero's Meddlesome Divinity to Virgil's Fama

6th March - Harbours and ships in the Hellenistic and Roman seas of Greece: An intricate and problematic relationship

6th March - Authorial Metadata and the Global History Archive: trips, traps and tricks

28th February - The Legacies of Ancient Theatre in Middle Byzantium

7th February - Colonies, Companies, and Crossings: Presentations in Honour of Dr Margaret Small

7th February - Keeping Time: Temporal Imagery and Thought in the Calendars of Later Byzantium

31st January - Rationality, scepticism and myth: on the motivations of the Peri Apiston of Palaephatus

24th January - Commerce & Crisis in the Eleventh-Century Empire of New Rome: The View from Ani

17th January - Magicians and Maggots: Receptions of Ancient Egypt in Heavy Metal Music

2022

7th December - New Voices from CBOMGS

7th December - BRIHC In Public Event: What is housing poverty, who does it affect and how?

23rd November - Identifying patronage networks in rural communities in early Islamic Egypt

16th November - "Non-political classes" between Republic and Principate

12th November - Inventing Slavonic: cultures of writing between Rome and Constantinople.

9th November - Archaeology, history, and the videogame industry

26th October - Athens and the Antigonids

19th October - Theophrastus' Object Lessons

5th October - Structural and Physical Violence at the Birth of Democracy: A Bioarchaeological Perspective

28th September - Travellers' Tales

16th May - Historiography as worldmaking: a new approach to historical writing in Byzantium

11th May - The Work of Objects: Imagining Things in Roman Writing

4th May - Aegean seal-engravers: their materials, tools, techniques and the evolution of skills

27th April - Kleanthis Mantzouranis (Edinburgh): Aristotle on philotimia

30th March - Dan Reynolds (Birmingham): Making Deserts Bloom: Byzantium and the British Empire in Mandate Palestine, c.1922-c.1948

9th March - Karin Schlapbach (Fribourg): "Sensing Religion": Contextualizing Servius' views on dance

16th February - David Ricks (Kings/Birmingham): Haunted by Missolonghi: Revolution and nostalgia in two Greek poets

9th February - Pramit Chadhuri (Texas Austin) and Joseph Dexter (Harvard): Computational differentiation of genre and speaker styles in Latin literature

2nd February - Siren Çelik (Marmara): Writing a new biography of Manuel II Palaiologos

2021

8th December - Romans, Egyptians, and the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717/8)

1st December - Leisure, Luxury, Austerity, and Citizenship in Archaic and Classical Sparta

24th November - Keleusate: Ceremony and Architecture in the Great Palace of Constantinople

17th November - Sinuhe, Sex and Snow: What Egyptology does with Poems

27th October - Editorial Power: Galen and his Manipulated Canon

20th October - Looking for the Poor in Byzantium

13th October - Seeing Incarceration in Antiquity: Two Case Studies

6th October - Greek Manuscripts in Birmingham: A New Catalogue

20th May - Questioning the accuracy of the Origo Constantini imperatoris

6th May - Encountering Ottomans and Mamluks in Late 15th-century Italian Painting

5th May - Early urbanism in Europe?: the case of the Ukrainian Trypillia megasites

28th April - Plato and Lyric Memory

22nd April - Byzantium and its islands

21st April - The Ending of Roman Britain: new thinking on an old conundrum

24th March - Prehistoric Mesopotamian figurines - first attempts at archaeological context. The Power of Convention: A Middle Kingdom Group Statuette in Context

18th March - New voices

17th March - Becoming-Eurydice in 21st century rock opera.

11th March - Breadstamps: Imprinting the Sacred

24th February - State Concept and State Experience in the Ancient Near East

10th February - The Power of Convention: A Middle Kingdom Group Statuette in Context

4th February - Between text and image, between writing and orality

28th January - The Great Church which is called Sophia

2020

8th December - Migration and Mobility within the ancient Mediterranean world. Question of scale and structure

3rd December - Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks

25th November - "The Sphinx's seamless veil": Exploring the Religious Reception of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

19th November - The Palaiologan Inscriptions of Venetian Crete: interpretative contradictions.

13th November - Ben Salisbury: Public opinion and the public sphere in the late Roman Republic

11th November - Early urbanism in Europe?: the case of the Ukrainian Trypillia megasites

29th October - String theory: order and disruption in Byzantine interlace

27th October - Building God's empire: archaeology, religion and the Byzantine reconquest of Africa

20th October - Dancing in the streets of Constantinople

14th October - Back through Byzantium: textual transmission, global history and the journey of a travel account

8th October - Quarantine Tales

26th March - Cancelled: Questioning the accuracy of the Origo Constantini imperatoris

25th March - State Concept and State Experience in the Ancient Near East

18th March - "The Sphinx's seamless veil": Exploring the Religious Reception of Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

11th March - Contemporary reworkings of the myth of Eurydice

5th March - Title to be confirmed

26th February - "Can I just say that this has been the most disturbing paper I've read?" – re-thinking the bog bodies of later prehistoric Europe

13th February - 'Augustine's women'

12th February - Identifying and interpreting fake inscriptions from the 18th century

6th February - Living heritage in Greece: perceptions of traditional settlements

5th February - The analysis of human skeletal remains and the work of the forensic anthropologist

30th January - Female agency in Mystras: fashion indices in late Byzantine art

23rd January - The view from the edge: Byzantium and post-Roman Hispania

16th January - Approaching the 'Macedonian Dynasty': family and gender

2019

11th December - The challenges of building a state anew: Egypt in the early Middle Kingdom

5th December - Approaches to the Byzantine novel

4th December - Building God's empire: archaeology, religion and the Byzantine reconquest of Africa

27th November - For Themistocles of Phrearrhioi, for the sake of honour'. A new perspective on the Athenian institution of ostracism

21st November - Morale and discipline in the Ottoman army,.c.1450-c.1600

20th November - Lachares and Menander: a theatre-historical look at POxy 1235, col. iii, 103-12

14th November - Institutionalising citizenship in Ancient Greece

14th November - Byzantium and Africa: a new frontier

13th November - Magistrates' accountability and epigraphic documents in the Greek cities: accounts and inventories

31st October - Byzantium: commonwealth, empire or nation-state?

24th October - Bridging the Gap: processions in early medieval Constantinople

23rd October - Debating Tiberian political discourse

17th October - English chaplains and the Greek Church in 18th-century Aleppo

16th October - A report on the 2019 Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS) Project

10th October - Islamisation and Sufism in Mongol Anatolia and beyond

9th October - Tom Irson's head: a case study in the reception of Lucian of Samosata

21st March - Flavius Josephus in medieval Greek and Latin Histories: some cross-cultural approaches

20th March - Making Time: Physical Manifestations of Time in Ancient Art

14th March - Francis Bacon in Ancient Greek. Nikolaos Mavrokordatos (1680-1730) and cultural mobility

7th March - Consular networks, shipping routes, and the Ottoman world in the late 19th century

6th March - Medicine, Empire and Difference in the Roman World

28th February - Greek Adoptees Anonymous: adoption, memory and Cold War Greece

27th February - Recasting the Chorus: Non-citizen choral performers in fifth and fourth-century Attic drama

14th February - 'Remnants of Byzantium': the uses of the past by the expatriated Greeks of Turkey

7th February - Kantakouzenos' daemon: providence and persuasion in late Byzantine historiography

6th February - Winckelmann's love letters: epistolarity, sexuality and classical reception

31st January - Unlikely migrants: slavery, emancipation, and race in the Reform-Era Ottoman Mediterranean

30th January - Dido: Reclaiming a Carthaginian Queen

24th January - Interpreting the Constantinopolitan landscape: A Rus traveller in Byzantium

23rd January - Ovid's Metamorphic Roman Cycle: Epic after Ardea Burns

17th January-17th February - Environment, economy and landscape in early modern Cyprus

16th January - Wearing Rome: the toga and the Roman man

2017

6th December - Making canon out of nothing, or the peculiar history of a few Mesopotamian objects, and a few odd comments about Sumerian literature

23rd November - When the "I" becomes "we": From personal to collective memories. Reflections from locals in Greek traditional settlements.

15th November - Faking it in Antiquity: The Letters of Marcus Brutus and Mithridates

9th November - Title to be confirmed

8th November - Politics of Collecting in nineteenth century Greece

26th October - Exploring perceptions of heritage in Greek traditional settlements

18th October - How do Egyptian hieroglyphs and other images both work together and stay apart?

10th October - Title to be confirmed

10th October - 'I am Antony yet': Reading Mark Antony's Mail

10th October - Title to be confirmed

5th October - Title to be confirmed

4th October - Making sense of Sulla: memory, recovery and Cicero's early speeches

28th September - Constructing an ontology of the historic battlefield (or, some of what we did on our holiday)

27th September - Is it a farm? The archaeology of farmsteads in mainland Greece

15th March - The unsayable in Ovid's Remedia Amoris

14th March - Online Ovids: the exiles of Marie Darrieussecq and Saviana Stãnescu

8th March - The imperial senate and the city of Rome

28th February - Antinous and the Lerna mysteries: A marble statue from the sanctuary of Demeter Prosymna and Dionysus

22nd February - 'And there was no one who would remember it': technologies of remembrance and the materialisation of social memory in Middle Kingdom Egypt

7th February - The Canopus conundrum: statuary from the underwater excavations in Abu Kir, Egypt

31st January - Bad art? What can we learn if we dare discuss quality in Roman provincial sculpture from Moesia Superior

25th January - The Tiburtine Sibyl at the Villa d'Este: Oracular Encounters & Prophetic Locales

17th January - Preserving the hidden seeds: what happened to Celtic art in Roman Britain?

11th January - The religious life of Dura-Europos in twenty-five (relatively unknown) objects

10th January - The Aphrodite of Emesa: Marble statuettes and religious life in Roman Syria