Ancient queens established a powerful public presence through visual and material culture, and their legacies continue to shape and impact the ways we express ideas about race, gender, and identity. 

QUEEN: REIMAGINING POWER FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT is an interdisciplinary, virtual symposium hosted by NYU Gallatin on September 23-24, 2021. 

Royal and elite women in the ancient world established and maintained a powerful public presence through visual and material culture. While the principal ancient narratives tend to cast women as passive and immobile, the material record presents numerous alternative pictures that problematize this relationship of gender, agency, and mobility. Throughout the 1st millennium BCE, such women moved across the interconnected geographies of the Mediterranean and western Asia to marry into new dynasties, participate in war, and oversee the design and construction of new monuments and art works. Through their direct and indirect involvement in shaping art and visual culture, ancient royal and elite women enrich our broader, contemporary discussions on the art of power; intersections of race, gender, and agency; and the production and negotiation of political identities through art and monuments in the deep past to the present. Indeed, modern-day expressions of queenship take place beyond elite spheres, as artists, performers, and political actors have invoked and adapted aspects of ancient queenship. 

This virtual symposium integrates scholarly and creative knowledge production from different perspectives that broaden the stakes and widen the impact of historical work. The symposium aims to model collaborative, critical, and public approaches to history and art by including the expertise of students, artists, performers, and educators beyond the university alongside the work of scholars and curators. This gathering hybridizes a scholarly conference with an arts exhibition, live performances, and public engagement initiatives. The goal is to bring diverse perspectives from multiple disciplines, generations, and practices while filling in the gaps that exclude women and femmes out of historical and political memory. By highlighting multiple ways of knowing, we aim to foster a space that is academic, creative, political, intersectional, intersubjective, and speculative.

Spanning two days, the symposium comprises seven panel discussions, five keynote talks, one drag performance, and public engagement activities in partnership with the Makeup Museum. Log on to this website one week before the live symposium to watch and learn from participant presentations. Keynote presenters include La Vaughn Belle (visual artist), Amy Gansell (Associate Professor of Art History, St. John’s University), Shelley Haley (Edward North Professor Classics, Hamilton College; President, Society for Classical Studies) Jackie Murray (Associate Professor of Classics, Univ. of Kentucky), Aminah Fadhil Jafaar Al-Bayati (Director, Iraq Museum Library), and New York City-based performance artist Mrs. Smith.