Ashley L. Bacchi (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Jewish History and Ancient Mediterranean Religions at Starr King School for the Ministry of the Graduate Theological Union, as well as a lecturer at Humboldt State University and Pacifica Graduate Institute. Bacchi has cultivated an interdisciplinary approach to contextualizing the Hellenistic Mediterranean, which includes religious studies, classics, art history, archaeology, cultural history, literary theory, and feminist theory. This approach is exemplified in her book Uncovering Jewish Creativity in Book III of the Sibylline Oracles: Gender, Intertextuality, & Politics. The focus of her presentation is her course “Gender, Power, & Hellenistic Art,” the syllabus for which can be found on her academia page: https://sksm.academia.edu/AshleyBacchiPhD
Ellie Bennett (she/her) received her doctorate from the University of Helsinki in April 2021 with a dissertation called ‘The “Queens of the Arabs” During the Neo-Assyrian Period’. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of Excellence Ancient Near Eastern Empires, and her research is focussed on using digital techniques to research aspects of masculinities. Personal website: http://elliebennettacademic.home.blog; Twitter: @sharratu_EllieB.
Karen Britt (she/her) is assistant professor of art history at Northwest Missouri State University. As an art historian engaged in archaeology, her research focuses on the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. She has worked on archaeological projects at various sites in both regions and is currently the mosaics specialist for the Huqoq Excavation Project (huqoq.org) in Israel. In her scholarship, Britt explores how architectural decoration, in particular mosaics, can illuminate culture and society in the late Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State’s division of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers. She has authored or co-authored numerous articles and a monograph. She is currently at work on a book titled Louder than Words: Female Artistic Patronage in Palestine and Arabia during the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods.
Elizabeth D. Carney (she/her) is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar in the Humanities, Emerita, at Clemson University. Her focus has been on Macedonian and Hellenistic monarchy and the role of royal women in ancient monarchy. She has written Women and Monarchy in Ancient Macedonia (2000), Olympias, Mother of Alexander the Great. (2006), Arsinoë of Egypt and Macedon: A Royal Life (2013) and Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian Power (2019). Some of her articles dealing with monarchy are collected in King and Court in Ancient Macedonia: Rivalry, Treason and Conspiracy (2015). She has coedited Philip II and Alexander the Great (2010) with Daniel Ogden, Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty (2018) with Caroline Dun, and The Routledge Companion to Women and Monarchy in the Ancient Mediterranean World (2020), with Sabine Müller. Website: http://elizab.people.clemson.edu/carneyhome.html.
ChelseaDee (she/her) is a multi-hyphenate, interdisciplinary creator and arts educator. Specializing in theater-making, she performs, teaches, curates, co-facilitates, develops curriculum, directs, and produces arts events. Her focus is creating new works of theater that highlight history and challenge dominant narratives and ensuring art is a tool in the hands of the people. Instagram: @thatuppitygirl; Website: http://misschelsead.weebly.com/; Podcast website: https://vanguardoftheviragoes.com/
Dr. Ainsley M. Cameron (she/her) is Curator of South Asian Art, Islamic Art and Antiquities at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Cameron completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2010, where her doctoral research focused on the Rajasthani painting workshop at Devgarh. She also holds an MA from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and a BA in Archaeology and History from the University of Toronto. Cameron’s previous curatorial experience includes positions held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the British Library. She has published, delivered lectures, and organized exhibitions exploring the art histories of India and the Islamic world. In Cameron’s role at the Cincinnati Art Museum, she is responsible for the acquisition, research, and display of the museum’s South Asian, Ancient Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Antiquities collections. Cameron is also Project Director of the ongoing reinstallation project to re-envision the art and architecture of the ancient Middle East (funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Islamic world, and South Asia.
Mehreen Chida-Razvi (she/her) is an Islamic Art Historian specializing in the art and architecture of Mughal South Asia. She is the Deputy Curator of the Nasser D Khalili Collection of Islamic Art and the In-House Editor for their publication series, is an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, and regularly teaches courses and lectures on Islamic and Indo-Islamic art at universities and museums in London. She was formerly a Research Associate in the History of Art & Archaeology Department at SOAS, University of London, from 2015-2019. She has published extensively on aspects of Mughal and Persianate art, architecture and urbanism; her most recent publications include: ‘Power and Politics of Representation: Picturing Elite Women in Ilkhanid Painting’, Journal of the RAS (forthcoming 2021), ‘From Function to Form: Chini-khana in Safavid and Mughal Architecture’, South Asian Studies (2019), and ‘Lahore’s Badshahi Masjid: Spatial interactions of the Sacred and the Secular’ (Intellect Publishing, 2020). Dr Chida-Razvi has further shared her academic expertise with wider audiences through her participation in and consultation for documentaries on the Taj Mahal; programming on BBC World Service Radio, BBC2 and BBC4; participation in the Lahore and Jaipur Literary Festivals; and as an expert lecturer on cultural tours.
Justine Cudorge (she/her) is an advanced doctoral student at the Université of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne (France), in co-supervision with the Université of Namur (Belgium) since 2018. After graduating with a MA in late-antiquity from the Université of Rouen while studying the transition of late- roman sanctuaries from paganism to christianity, she is currently working on a medieval dissertation about gender studies entitled “Structure and challenges of polygynous systems in Frankish society: studying women’s place within the Merovingian palace, 5th-8th century”, under the supervision of Sylvie Joye, Isabelle Heullant-Donat and Étienne Renard. Her doctoral researches mainly focus on the social status of women through marriage and concubinage and the question of polygyny across Europa before the imposition of monogamy by the Church.
Megan Daniels (she/her) is assistant professor of ancient Greek material culture at the University of British Columbia. Her interests include the intersections of long distance trade with the growth of religious institutions and economic development across the Mediterranean world, as well as the political discourses of divine kingship between Greece, western Asia, and Egypt. She is interested in cross-disciplinary approaches to the ancient world, and has a forthcoming co-edited volume on data science and social sciences approaches to ancient Mediterranean religion and another edited volume on interdisciplinary approaches to ancient migration and mobility. Her current book project is a study of the evolution of divine kingship over the Late Bronze and Iron Ages in the eastern Mediterranean. Twitter: @meganjdaniels; Website: www.megandaniels.ca; https://cnrs.ubc.ca/people/megan-daniels/
Yanxiao He (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in ancient Near Eastern history from the University of Chicago. He is now working on his dissertation titled They Feel at Home: Gender, Animal, and Popular Performance on a Hellenistic Frontier. He got an honorable mention from the 2021 John Winkler Memorial Prize. He can be reached by yanxiao@uchicago.edu
Clare Fitzgerald (she/her) is the Associate Director for Exhibitions and Gallery Curator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. She has a background in both curatorship and education and holds a PhD in Art History from Emory University (Atlanta). As an Egyptologist, she has a particular interest in the definition of space through image and identity in funerary culture. She has held a number of fellowships, including at the American Research Center in Egypt and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has curated exhibitions and permanent installations on a wide array of topics and collections both ancient and modern and teaches museum methodology and practice.
Hallie Franks’ (she/her) research is in the art history of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia. She is the author of Hunters, Heroes, Kings (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2012) and The World Underfoot: Mosaics and Movement in the Greek Symposium (Oxford University Press, 2018). Her current project, a book titled Venus Envy, focuses on the influence of Greco-Roman sculpture in the construction of body aesthetics during the rise of physical (fitness) culture in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century.
Caitlin C. Gillespie (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and holds the Helaine and Alvin Allen Chair in Literature at Brandeis University. Educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Pennsylvania, Gillespie’s research centers on women, memory, and power in the early Roman empire. She has written numerous articles and chapters on imperial family members, including Livia, Agrippina the Elder, Messalina, Agrippina the Younger, and Poppaea, as well as pieces on lesser-known figures such as Epicharis. Her first book, Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Her current book project explores women’s movements in Tacitus’ Annals.
Valentina Grasso (she/her) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She is also an affiliate member of the ERC project “The Qur’an as a Source for Late Antiquity” (QaSLA, 2021-6), the Cambridge Silk Road Program, and the London Society for Medieval Studies. Valentina holds a B.A. cum laude from the University of Catania (Semitic Philology, 2015), a M.A. cum laude from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Islamic Studies, 2017), and a Ph.D. (Divinity, 2021) from the University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the history of pre-Islamic late antique Arabia under the supervision of Professor Garth Fowden. While her current research explores the interactions between Arabia and Ethiopia during Late Antiquity, her teaching seeks to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the first millennium world outside of a Eurocentric framework.
Aimee Hinds (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Roehampton, researching intersectional possibilities in receptions of Greek mythology. Her approach to intersectionality encompasses queer theory, Marxist theory, post-coloniality and disability studies to explicitly open the boundaries of feminist theory. She has written about bad feminism in reception, issues with fashion’s engagement with the ancient Mediterranean, and polychromy in Neoclassical and modern art, and her research interests include exploring reception in material culture and popular culture. Twitter: @aimee_hinds
Allison Hurst (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia and an MTS in Hebrew Bible from Harvard Divinity School. Her scholarly interests focus on the tension between cultural constructions, political motivations, and literary forms vis-à-vis the depiction of women in the Hebrew Bible. Her current research, inspired by the enigmatic character of Hagar, traces the development of traditions about Egypt from the Pentateuch to the Prophets. Twitter at @allisonhurst_.
Bruce M. King (he/him) teaches ancients and moderns at the Gallatin School and at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He has published on Homer, Sophokles, and Plato, as well as on Freud’s Empedokles. He has coedited a volume (with Lillian Doherty) entitled Thinking the Greeks (Routledge, 2018). An article on the queer reception of Akhilleus and Patroklos (with Lynn Kozak) is forthcoming, as is a book on the Iliad, which is entitled Akhilleus All-Unheroic.
Christina Ko (she/her) is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and has since then shown her work in Los Angeles, CA, Washington D.C., and in NYC. Selected exhibitions include: “In Good Taste”, Dinner Gallery, New York, NY (2021); “Futures Ever Arriving”, Chelsea Market, New York, NY (2021); “Internal Arrangements”, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2020); “Downloading Place”, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY (2019); “Fever Lure”, Selenas Mountain Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2019); “Crossover: East and West”, Korean Cultural Center, Washington D.C. (2018). Her work has been featured in Gallery Gurls, the Arcade Project Zine, Hiss Magazine, The Fader magazine, The Washington Post, and Ballpit Magazine. Website: christinayunako.com; Instagram: @christina_yuna_ko
Lex Ladge (she/her) is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Chicago. She studies Greek and Roman art with a focus on art, urbanism, and spatiality in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. She received her BA in Classics from Reed College in 2019.
Lindsey A. Mazurek (she/her) is assistant professor of Roman archaeology at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on questions of power, imperialism, cultural change, and religion in the Roman Empire, primarily through the study of Egyptian religion in the northern Mediterranean. She received her BA from UC Berkeley and her MA and PhD from Duke University. She is the author of Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press) and her work has appeared in the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, NTT: Journal of Theology and the Study of Religion, and Journal of Roman Archaeology. Twitter: @effiedarling194; Website: lindseyamazurek.com
Michael Moore (he/him) recently received his PhD in ancient Near Eastern studies from UCLA, writing a dissertation on queenship in the Hittite empire. His research focuses on identity, power, and agency in the royal courts of the Late Bronze Age. Additionally, he has worked as a field archaeologist in Turkey and Cyprus.
Kate Newell (she/her) is a second year Latin M.A. student in the Department of Classics at CU Boulder. She has a B.A. in Classical Studies with a concentration in Latin and a minor in Math from William and Mary, 2020. Her interests include imperial Latin literature and royal women in ancient Mediterranean societies.
Alice Parkin (she/her) is a DPhil candidate in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her research considers images of women in the art of Classical Greece, particularly the Amazons, with an interest in the interaction of art with myth, gender, and ethnic identity. She is on Twitter @aliceeparkin.
Jessica Plant (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Cornell University, where she received her MA in Archaeology in 2016 and a MA in the History of Art in 2019. She studies the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean with a focus on Roman and Late Antiquity. Her research interests include ornament and craft production, the history of the discipline, and the construction of art hierarchies in the fields of Roman, Iranian, and Islamic art, which she explores through stucco in her dissertation project, titled: “Molding States: Stucco as a Transformative Medium in the First Millennium CE.” Jessica was the 2020-2021 Samuel H. Kress Fellow of art and architecture of Antiquity at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she also held the James Rignall Wheeler fellowship as a Regular Member in 2019-20.
Kate Rose (she/her) is an archaeologist and PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Harvard University. She specializes in the archaeology of the Near East and North Africa, mortuary archaeology, landscape archaeology, and ancient urbanism. She approaches ancient cemeteries through analyzing their integration with the surrounding landscape, intra-site spatial patterns, and theoretical paradigms of identity politics and intersectionality. She graduated from Stanford University in 2013 with a BA in Archaeology with honors. While at Stanford, she specialized in Neolithic archaeology of the Near East and Anatolia. She published and excavated at El Hemmeh, Jordan and Çatalhöyük, Turkey. She began her studies at Harvard and joined the Amarna Project in Egypt, excavating 18th dynasty non-elite cemeteries in the ancient city of Akhetaten. She has also conducted fieldwork in Spain and Northern Iraq. Her dissertation investigates the relationship between gender and power in ancient Kush through spatial analyses of royal cemeteries. She is currently preparing to defend her dissertation and direct an excavation project in Sudan at Jebel Barkal. Website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/katerose; Twitter: @archaeo_kate Instagram: @archaeokate.
Michael Seymour (he/him) is Associate Curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He completed his Ph.D. at University College London before joining the British Museum in the Department of the Middle East, where he was co-curator of the exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality (2008–9). He joined The Met in 2011, assisting on the exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age (2014–15) and co-editing its symposium volume (2016). In 2014 he published Babylon: Legend, History, and the Ancient City, a history of Babylon’s cultural reception from antiquity to the present. Most recently, he co-curated The World between Empires: Art and Identity in the Ancient Middle East(2019), on visual culture and religious and civic identity in the Roman and Parthian period. His research focuses on the reception and representation of the ancient Near East and on Mesopotamian art of the first millennium B.C.
Casey Stark (she/her) (Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2015) is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Bowling Green State University (Ohio). Dr. Stark has research interests in religion; women, gender and sexuality; family; imperial authority; reception studies; urban spaces; epigraphy; and numismatics. Prior to joining BGSU as a faculty member in 2018, she was an assistant lecturer at Idaho State University and taught at The University of Toledo, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She regularly instructs the early world history survey in addition to courses on Roman and Greek history, and the lives of women in the latter civilizations. Website: https://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/history/faculty-and-staff/casey-stark.html
Quinn Stickley (they/them) is an MA student in Archaeology at Cornell University. Their research on ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern iconography applies queer theory to visual representations of the human body in order to learn about ancient gender ontology. Their MA thesis focuses on representations of Hatshepsut from Deir el-Bahri and the intersections of Egyptian gender ontology with contemporary royal ideology.
Jillian Stinchcomb (she/her) is a Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in Hebrew Bible and Mediterranean Cross-Cultural Textual Antiquity at Brandeis University. Trained in Religious Studies and Biblical Studies, her first project traces the reception history of the Queen of Sheba across premodern Jewish, Muslim, and Christian texts, interrogating the diverse memories of the Solomonic past and the ways stories about the Queen of Sheba showcase concerns about gender, power, wealth, and alterity.
Saana Svärd (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies and the director of the Centre of Excellence in Ancient Near Eastern Empires at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Much of her work focuses on women and gender in Mesopotamia, including two monographs: “Women and Power in Neo-Assyrian Palaces” (2015) and (with Charles Halton) “Women’s Writing of Ancient Mesopotamia” (2018). In recent years, her focus has expanded to adapting and developing approaches from social sciences, digital humanities, and linguistic semantics to gain new perspectives on cuneiform sources. Homepage: www.helsinki.fi/ancient-near-eastern-empires. Twitter: @SaanaSvard @ANEE_Helsinki. Facebook: Ancient Near Eastern Empires
The Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO)—LaVaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yanique. The Virgin Island Studies Collective is a group of academics, artists, and activists who are committed to centering the Virgin Islands as a site of inquiry and theorization beyond a notion of utopia or space that is not meaningfully occupied. The collective situates this field as a multidisciplinary framework through which we—and others—are able to study and understand the Virgin Islands. The founding of VI Studies began in 2017 as a series of conversations between LaVaughn Belle, Tami Navarro, Hadiya Sewer, and Tiphanie Yanique. We, the VI Studies Collective (VISCO), are centrally concerned about the erasure of the Virgin Islands from larger discourses and the lack of resources to attend to our community’s needs, most notably the silences surrounding the territory’s continuous colonial subjection, the lack of cultural institutions to preserve Virgin Islands history, and the ecological precarity demonstrated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. From this set of discussions grew the formalized working group, VI Studies. As a group of Afro-Caribbean women, we are committed to a practice of collaborative production and inclusion. The Virgin Islands Studies Collective: La Vaughn Belle, Artist in Residence, University of the Virgin Islands Tami Navarro, Associate Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women Hadiya Sewer, Research Fellow, African and African American Studies Program, Stanford University Tiphanie Yanique, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University
Tasha Vorderstrasse (she/her) received her BA in Anthropology at Washington University in St Louis and her MA & PhD in Near Eastern archaeology from the University of Chicago. After receiving her PhD, she was a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Near East in Leiden. She then returned to Chicago in 2011 and was an Oriental Institute (OI) Research Associate until 2017 when she became the University and Continuing Education Program Coordinator. She is currently curating the OI special exhibition on the 19th century Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin, Antoin Sevruguin: Past and Present (online at https://oi.uchicago.edu/museum-exhibits/special-exhibits/sevruguin/introduction) and is the editor of the accompanying catalog. Her work looks at the material culture of the Middle East and North Africa, South Caucasus, and Central Asia and the relationships between these various areas and China. Recently, she has increasingly focused on the way in which we study and present the past and believes that we all have a role in understanding this process. This work has been informed by the postcolonial tour she gives of the OI, primarily to University of Chicago undergraduates classes, as well as the recent OI class she taught on the subject: Understanding the Past: Looking at Museums. She has also used this approach to her classes, tours, and teacher workshops on ancient Nubian Queens and Saharan rock art in North Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Libya, Algeria, and Chad). She is currently looking at how ancient Egypt and Nubia has been interpreted in 19th and 20th century America, namely concentrating on the work of Black female artists, scholars, and intellectuals, including Edmonia Lewis, Pauline Hopkins, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston.
Jacquelyn Williamson (she/her) received her PhD in Egyptology from the Johns Hopkins University. She is a member of the expedition team to Tell el-Amarna and director at Kom el-Nana, the location of Nefertiti’s sun temple, the subject of her first book. She held positions at UC Berkeley, Harvard University, and Brandeis University and is currently Associate Professor of Ancient Art and Archaeology at George Mason University.