Seminar Participants

Naman Ahuja is Associate Professor of Ancient Indian Art and Architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where his research and graduate teaching focus on Indian iconography, sculpture, temple architecture and Sultanate period painting. He holds a Nehru Fellowship at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teen Murti House this year. Previously, he was Fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where he authored a catalogue of the museum’s collection of Ancient Indian antiquities. From 2001 to 2002 he was Curator of Indian sculpture in the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, London. He was lecturer of the MA program on the Religious Fine and Decorative Arts of India at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University) from 1998 to 2000 and Tutor of the SOAS / Christie’s and latterly the British Museum’s Diploma in Indian Art. Dr. Ahuja’s Ph.D (SOAS, London University, 2000) was titled ‘Early Indian Moulded Terracotta: The Emergence of an Iconography and Variations in Style, Second Century BC to First Century AD.’ This was the first comprehensive taxonomy of artefacts from excavated sites and later formed the basis for the international conference: ‘A Pantheon Rediscovered?’ which he co-organised at Yale in 2007. He has curated several exhibitions in India and abroad on themes ranging from Ancient to modern Art. Some of his publications include: Divine Presence, The Arts of India and the Himalayas (Five continents editions, Milan, 2003) which was translated into Catalan and Spanish, “Changing Gods, Enduring Rituals: Observations on Early Indian Religion as seen through Terracotta Imagery c. 200 BC – AD 200” In South Asian Archaeology, Paris, 2001, Ramkinkar Through the Eyes of Devi Prasad (Delhi, 2007) and his latest work, The Making of the Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad (Routledge, 2011) is expected this year.

Kimberly Cassibry works on commemoration in the Roman provinces. Her current project focuses on Roman France and Britain, particularly souvenirs from Hadrian’s Wall, the cavalry tombstone recently discovered at Lancaster, and Paris’ first public monument, the so-called Pillar of the Boatmen. Her dissertation (UC Berkeley, 2009) reconsidered the significance of “triumphal” arches in the Roman provinces and is currently being prepared for publication. She is also interested in how European imperial strategies drove the 19^th century excavation and publication of these monuments, a topic she continues to research in French and British archaeological archives. Studying the Roman provinces has also allowed her to take a seminar on Roman North Africa at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and to walk along the German limes with a workshop from the University of Heidelberg. When not trudging through muddy archaeological sites, I can be found at Wellesley College. As the Assistant Professor of Ancient Art, she teaches courses on Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Celtic material culture.

Mario Cesarano is working on the imperial cult from Augustus to Nero and focuses particularly on Julio-Claudian dynastic statuary groups. From last May, he has been working as Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Perugia under direction of professor Mario Torelli on the meaning of the wide acceptance of the so-called Pompeian Second Style by the elites of Roman Italy as evidence of an intellectual unification of this class

Mariana Egri completed a PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is currently a lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca, Romania. She works primarily on the history and archaeology of the Late Republic and early Roman Empire. Her main fields of interest are the interactions between the Mediterranean world and indigenous populations from the middle and lower Danube, the manipulation of material culture in various provincial settings, and convivial practices as social and political instruments.

Jennifer Gates-Foster (Ph.D. Michigan 2005) is an archaeologist in the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has held a post since 2007. Prior to her arrival in Texas, she held the Moses and Mary Finley Fellowship at Darwin College, Cambridge. Jennifer is interested in material manifestations of cultural interaction between groups, particularly in the context of the Hellenistic and early Roman Near East, especially Egypt. She has been part of archaeological projects in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, Israel and the United States. While her primary interest is in the analysis of pottery and trade patterns in the Hellenistic and Early Roman Near East, she has also worked on questions of hybridity and style. She is currently at work on her first book, a study of the material culture of Hellenistic frontiers in Egypt and the implications for our understanding of ancient states and their regional dynamics.

Dimitris Grigoropoulos is Academic Secretary/Assistant to the Director at the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. Dimitris graduated from Athens and obtained an M.A. in Roman Archaeology and a PhD in Archaeology from Durham, for which he explored the settlement history of the Piraeus in the Roman period and Late Antiquity, focusing on the re-assessment of urban excavation data. Since then he has been involved in several survey, excavation and post-excavation projects in mainland Greece, Crete and Egypt as investigator and advisor on Roman ceramics. Apart from Roman pottery, his interests include the evolution of urban settlement in Greece during the Roman period and the place of the Roman past in Modern Greek identity.

Steven Hijmans is an associate professor of Roman art and archaeology in the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. His research centres on the art of religions in the Roman Empire, and has hitherto focused on the Roman sun god Sol (on whom he has completed a monograph currently under consideration with Brill). He is now shifting his attention to religious art in the upper Danube provinces, particularly the Pannonia’s, studying a large database of relevant images amassed over the past years by graduate students working under his direction. Aim of his project is to study the construction of Roman and regional identities in religious art, moving beyond the overly simple dichotomy “indigenous-Roman”. In a related project one of his PhD students, Tristan Ellenberger, is studying the construction of identities through funerary practices at a number of cemeteries in the same region. They have tentative plans to present, compare, and contrast their respective findings in a co-authored monograph. Steven is Dutch by birth and graduated from the University of Groningen. He lived in Rome, Izmir, and Athens prior to moving to Edmonton with his wife, associate professor of Greek Archaeology at the same department, and three daughters.

Alicia Jimenez is a postdoctoral research fellow (Spanish Ministry of Education) working at University College London (Anthropology Department) and Glasgow University (Archaeology, School of Humanities) as part of the ‘Material Connections: mobility, materiality and Mediterranean identities’ project, jointly directed by Peter van Dommelen, Bernard Knapp and Michael Rowlands. She is author of Imagines hibridae: una aproximación postcolonialista a las necrópolis de la Bética (Madrid, 2008) and editor of the session Colonising a Colonised Territory (Proceedings of the 17^th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Rome, 2010). Her research interests include archaeological theory and the transition between the Iron Age and the Roman period on the Iberian Peninsula, with an especial interest in topics such as social change and colonization, mimetic material culture in the Roman provinces and the interaction between the past and the present in the creation of contemporary ‘origin myths’ in Spain.

Matthew McCarty's research as a Mellon Humanities postdoctoral fellow at Yale focuses on the art and archaeology of religion across the Roman Empire and the negotiations between local and imperial cultures. My dissertation (Oxford), currently undergoing revision for publication with Cambridge UP, examines cultural change in Punic and Roman Africa through the close contextualization of series of 3,000 sculpted votive stelae from the region. Other current projects include work on the mithraeum at Dura Europos, the sculptural assemblage from the sanctuary of Saturn at Ammaedara, the Punic "statue habit," and late antique statue re-display in North Africa.

Dragana Mladenovic is currently a Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. I specialize on various aspects of Roman archaeology of the Central Balkans, particularly looking at cultural responses to the Roman conquest, the subject peoples’ experience of the empire, issues of identity and imperialism. My work in the past also included aspects of provincial settlement patterns, economy and burial.

Tom Morton is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University and teaches the entire history of architecture. His scholarly work focuses on the architecture and urbanism in Roman Africa. Under the aegis of the Central Arizona Society of the AIA, he created Apples + Archaeology - an outreach program for K-12 education in the metro Phoenix area. At this year's annual meeting of the AIA he was elected Vice-President for Societies.

Carlos Norena: Carlos Noreña is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He works on the history of the Roman Empire, with particular interests in the figure of the Roman emperor, the western Roman provinces, and aristocratic representation. He is the co-editor of The Emperor and Rome: Space, Representation, and Ritual (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and author of Imperial Ideals in the Roman West:Representation, Circulation, Power (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2011).

Maria Papaioannou is an associate professor of Classical Archaeology in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New Brunswick, in Atlantic Canada. We are currently celebrating our 225th anniversary of the founding of this institution...and our department! I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology -- with a special focus on Greek and Roman housing in my seminar courses. In addition, when required, I also teach ancient Greek. My on-going research focuses on various aspects (political and cultural) of housing in Roman Greece for which I am preparing a manuscript; while at the moment I am completing a publication of a peristyle house of the Roman period from ancient Abdera, excavated almost 60 years ago by the Greek archaeologist Demetrios Lazarides. I serve as founding director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies at the University of New Brunswick (UNB), founding president of the Archaeological Institute of America, New Brunswick Society, and part of a committee which established the inter-departmental undergraduate archaeology program at UNB.

Louise Revell specializes in Roman public architecture and urbanism in the western provinces. Her research interests include the relationship between identity, ideology and imperialism, and their expression through material culture. Her work on buildings concentrates on social space as a way of understanding questions of integration and social differentiation. Recent research projects have looked at Roman imperialism in the Spanish provinces and Britain. Her book 'Roman Imperialism and Local Identities' explores the relationship between Roman identities and daily practice as experienced through public architecture in the provinces. She has also worked on the fora of Roman Britain, and military bath-houses. Her most recent research has explored gender, family and the life-course within the western provinces.

Hamed Salem is currently working as Lecturer and Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Birzeit University since 1986. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden and an MA in the Anthropology Department at the University of Arizona. His research interests include Palestinian Archaeology, Ethno-archaeology, Pottery Analysis; Excavation and survey fieldwork; Cultural Landscape and GIS Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage management; digital mapping.

KP Shajan is an archaeologist, currently working as Associate Professor at Kerala Council for Historical Research, Thiruvananthapuram (affilaited to University of Kerala), India. His primary interest is early maritime contacts of Malabar coast (SW coast of India) with various parts of the old world. Shajan and his colleagues have identified the site of Pattanam which could be‘Muziris’, the emporium of spice trade, near the modern port city of Cochin in 2004. Since then, excavation and multi-disciplinary research is being conducted on the site by Kerala Council for Historical Research, developing collaboration with national and international research institutions. Has extensive experience in excavation of Iron age and Early Historic sites in south India.

Rebecca Sweetman: Dr Rebecca Sweetman is a senior lecturer in Ancient History & Archaeology in the School of Classics, University of St Andrews, Scotland. She works primarily on Roman and Late Antique Greece and is particularly interested in Crete, Knossos and Sparta. A key area of interest is the application of art (particularly mosaics) and architecture to a broader study of the nature of change in the provinces when they become part of the Roman Empire and later as an indicator of Christianization. Her excavations on the Acropolis Basilica Sparta have lead to broader studies of the Late Antique Peloponnese and more recently she has embarked on a project on a Roman rural site on the outskirts of Sparta.

Lina Tahan: Lina G. Tahan has completed a Ph.D. in archaeology and museum studies from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She is currently a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change at Leeds Metropolitan University where she previously held the position of Senior Research Fellow until 2010. Her research and teaching interests relate to: (1) the representation issues within Middle Eastern museums collections, exhibitions and visitors; (2) the history of collections and museum development in Lebanon within the political context; (3) the definition of heritage in Lebanon and how this links to identity formation and the creation of a sense of place; (4) the role of museums in fostering understanding in divided societies. She is an active member of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) mainly working for promoting museums in the Arab World.

Nancy Wicker is Professor of Art History at The University of Mississippi. Her research focuses on the reception of Roman art in Scandinavia during the Migration Period (5^th–6^th century), examining how Late Roman medallions inspired stamped gold pendants known as bracteates, which were worn by elite women across northern Europe. She aims to shift the study of bracteates from things to people — from traditional studies of typology, iconography, and chronology to consideration of the agency and identity of the smiths, patrons, and consumers of these objects. Her Ph.D. in Ancient Studies from the University of Minnesota encompassed interdisciplinary study of archaeology, art history, and Germanic philology, and she continues to carry out research in several directions, publishing on gender in archaeology, female infanticide during the Viking Age, Germanic animal-style art, and runic literacy. She has excavated in Germany and in Sweden — including at the Viking Age trading center of Birka — and has conducted experiments to reconstruct early medieval jewelry techniques.

William Wootton is the Research Councils UK Fellow in Roman Art at King’s College London. His research is concerned with craft production in antiquity, focusing on the intersections between materials and techniques, craftsmen and patrons. He has worked on the making of mosaics from the Hellenistic period into Late Antiquity and is the Principal Investigator on a Leverhulme-funded project on Roman stone carving which starts in July 2011. He has also recently received funding from the Getty Foundation to put on two workshops in Libya on mosaic conservation and site management during 2011 and 2012.