Spring 2023 Conference
Building Bodies: Investigating Bodies in the Ancient Mediterranean
Held via Zoom, March 24-25, 2023
Updated Submission Deadline! Abstracts Due January 20, 2023
Following a successful first conference, Bryn Mawr College’s SPEAC (Students Promoting Equity in Archaeology and Classics) is happy to announce our second biennial research conference, to be held virtually. As a group, we are dedicated to amplifying the voices of academically marginalized and underrepresented communities (including, but not limited to, BIPOC, FGLI, disabled, and LGBTQ+ scholars) in the fields of Classical Studies, Classical Archaeology, Near Eastern Archaeology, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (broadly conceived). For this conference, we are seeking research from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as unaffiliated and unfunded early-career scholars, that centers around the body and its role in both the ancient world and the modern disciplines that study it.
The United States Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade is a reminder that bodies are and have always been a site of public definition, investigation, violation, and marginalization. The current climate in American politics about the regulation of bodies makes a discussion of how the body functions and is regulated vitally important. The ways we talk about bodies in academia and other public spaces inherently affect and reveal the ways we treat bodies in general. This conference will endeavor to rethink our understanding of the body and its role in antiquity and its reception. In keeping with our mission statement, we invite papers that approach the topic intersectionally, with emphasis on the intersection between the body and race, ethnicity, class, disability, and gender.
Possible topics include:
- Construction of bodies
- Racialization of bodies
- Categorization of bodies (race, gender, sex, disability)
- Regulation of bodies (legally, ritually)
- Transformation of bodies
- Movement of bodies (immigration, migration, enslavement, conquest, colonization, incarceration)
- Exhibition and viewing of bodies
- Bodies of work and canons
- Which bodies study, and which are studied?
Abstracts of 200-250 words are due through this Google form by January 1, 2023. Feel free to email us at brynmawrspeac@gmail.com with any submission questions.
Spring 2021 Conference
