Recent appointments have strengthened our commitment to studying the ancient world through the theme of ‘the body’. We interpret this theme in an interdisciplinary way, bringing together the approaches of archaeology, anthropology, medical humanities, ancient history and classical studies to find ways of using material culture and written evidence alongside each other.
Any historical discipline needs to address what we see as a central question: is the past just like us, and therefore transparent, or entirely other, and therefore unknowable? Where the body is concerned, the fact that we share so many experiences with the people of the past may blind us to the difficulties of interpreting their writings, ideas, and objects. Studying how people thought about, treated and disposed of their bodies provides a window into ancient societies.
Members of the cluster also belong to the Faculty-wide ‘Gender in the Humanities’ grouping, and Jessica Hughes, Paula James and Helen King are on the steering group for this. Within the Classical Studies department, members are currently involved in writing a new MA module on the body which should be available in 2015.
Aarón Alzola-Romero comes from an archaeology and anthropology background. He is currently working on an edited volume that approaches the study of mass/crowd identity through the archaeological record. The book critically assesses the validity of traditional dichotomies such as: embodiment and disembodiment, individuation and deindividuation and the individual-society polarity.
Anastasia Bakogianni’s research examines the body of the actor in ancient Greek tragedy and its reception in the modern world. She is particularly interested in performance issues, especially how acting styles and costume both reinforce and enhance the portrayal of female protagonists in Greek tragedy on both the ancient and modern stage. Her work so far has focused in particular on Greek tragic heroines and on the portrayal of their emotional distress as embodied and performed by ancient and modern actors who undertook these roles.
Eleanor Betts’ research takes a phenomenological approach, exploring interrelationships between the physiological body, artefacts and place. She is particularly interested in how bodily sensations and experiences affected the construction and use of space, with foci on the cult places of Iron Age Italy and the urban locales of ancient Rome. She has published studies on the experience of cave sites in Central Adriatic Italy and multisensory movement around the city of Rome.
Emma-Jayne Graham’s research concerns the body in the Roman world, with a particular focus on the bodies of Republican and early Imperial Italy. She is interested in how bodily experiences of the material world gave meaning to people’s sense of self and how the body and its representation in material culture served as a locus for the construction and expression of personal and communal identity. Much of her research has been focused on the treatment of the body in death, including cremation rites, the burial of the disabled, memory and the manipulation of the corpse, as well as the cemetery as a multisensory landscape. Recent work has also focused on bodies in the sanctuary, including a study of votive offerings of swaddled babies and – with Jane Draycott (Sheffield) a forthcoming edited volume arising from a 2012 conference on the anatomical votive.
Valerie Hope’s research is centred on Roman death, including the treatment of dead and living bodies during funeral and commemorative rituals. A current focus is how the bodies of the bereaved were adapted to mark the state of mourning, and how these modifications were characterised (and gendered) in different genres. Recent publications include Roman Death: The Dying and the Dead in Ancient Rome (2009), and Memories and Mourning, Studies on Roman Death (2011).
Jessica Hughes works on the body in Greek and Roman material culture. Her PhD focused on images of personifications in ancient art, while her postdoctoral project on anatomical votives was conducted as part of a Leverhulme-funded project ‘Changing Beliefs of the Human Body’ at the University of Cambridge. She has published on a range of body-related topics including classical hybrids, the restoration of ancient sculpted bodies, and Roman votive images of ‘open torsos’ with visible intestines. With Katharina Rebay-Salisbury and Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, she edited Body Parts and Bodies Whole. Changing Relations and Meanings (2010, Oxbow). Her forthcoming book is entitled The Anatomy of Ritual: Votive Body Parts in the Greco-Roman World.
Paula James’ research has focused on issues of bodily integrity in Ovid’s myths of metamorphosis, from the transformation of Arachne into a living loom to the flaying of Marsyas so that his organs resemble the lyre he has challenged by playing the flute. She also looks at rigid representations of bodies, such as the interplay between flesh, stone and ivory in Ovid’s Pygmalion, and the tensions set up by the dual identity of gods, nymphs and other numinous creatures who can be both corporeal and fluid. Her books include Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (Continuum).
Helen King’s research focuses on the female body in both medicine and myth. In addition to studying the ancient body, she is interested in how ancient medical texts have been used, particularly in Europe from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. She is also interested in the body/mind nexus, and in working with medical practitioners from various fields. Her forthcoming book The One-Sex Body on Trial: The Classical and Early Modern Evidence (Ashgate) challenges Thomas Laqueur’s model of a move from a ‘one-sex’ to a ‘two-sex’ model of the body in the eighteenth century.
Phil Perkins works on the Etruscan body. He focuses on three main areas. First, ancient accounts of the ‘differentness’ of the Etruscans and the story in Herodotus that they migrated to Tuscany from modern day Turkey have attracted the attention of molecular biologists with an interest in the long-term history of the development of human populations. If ancient accounts were to be correct then it should be possible to detect this history of migration and ‘differentness’ in DNA; he examines DNA studies to ensure that they remain consistent with the archaeological record. Second, in 2011, excavations at Poggio Colla found an Etruscan depiction of a woman in childbirth - the first of its kind. This led him to research representations of childbirth in the ancient Mediterranean. Finally, for many years he has worked on Etruscan settlement patterns, and this is naturally accompanied by the study of Etruscan burial patterns.
James Robson is interested in attitudes towards the sex and the body in Greek culture in general and the comic plays of Aristophanes in particular. He has written on topics as diverse as bestiality, sexual assault, cross-dressing and obscenity and is currently working on projects looking at ideas of sex appeal in classical Greece as well as the ways in which the sexuality of Aristophanes’ plays have been reconfigured in modern translations and stagings. His books include Sex and Sexuality in Classical Athens (2013, Edinburgh University Press) and he edits the book series ‘Edinburgh Studies in the Classical Body’.
Ursula Rothe’s research is centred on dress in the Roman Empire. She considers the way people dressed and adorned their bodies in the ancient world as a prism through which to gain an insight into their self-constructed identities, reflecting aspects such as status, ethnicity, gender, age and occupation. Her main work to date has been in Rome’s northern provinces, where there is a wealth of material for dress in the form of grave portraits. She is interested in what people’s dress choices in these images, coupled with the grave inscriptions, can tell us about cultural groupings and orientations in those regions and the extent of their identification with Rome.
Katy Soar’s research concerns the role of performance within society, with a particular focus on the Bronze Age of Crete. She is interested in how the body can be used to generate meaning, identities and social relations through movement and performance. Recent work has focused on the use of performance in the funerary arena and on the Minoan practice of bull-leaping, and she is currently working on an edited volume about archaeological approaches to dance.
Rebecca Fallas, ‘Blame and infertility in the ancient world’
