Peter Keegan | Macquarie University (original) (raw)

Books by Peter Keegan

Livy's Women. Crisis, Resolution, and the Female in Rome's Foundational History, 2021

Livy’s Women explores the profound questions arising from the presence of women of influence and ... more Livy’s Women explores the profound questions arising from the presence of women of influence and power in the socio-political canvas of one of the most important histories of Rome and the Roman people, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City).

This theoretically informed study of Livy’s monumental narrative charts the fascinating links between episodes containing references to women in prominent roles and the historian’s treatment of Rome’s evolutionary foundation story. Explicitly gendered in relation to the socio-cultural contexts informing the narrative, the author’s background, the literary landscape of Livy's Rome, and the subsequent historiographical commentary, this volume offers a comprehensive, coherent and contextualised overview of all episodes in Ab Urbe Condita relating to women as agents of historical change.

As well as proving invaluable insights into socio-cultural history for Classicists, Livy’s Women will also be of interest to instructors, researchers, and students of female representation in history in general.

When one thinks of inscriptions produced under the Roman Empire, public inscribed monuments are l... more When one thinks of inscriptions produced under the Roman Empire, public inscribed monuments are likely to come to mind. Prominent dedicatory inscriptions on building architraves, statue bases listing the achievements and cursus honorum of an honorand, funerary monuments recording years lived and relationships left behind – these are the concrete results of an explosive interest in monumentalizing text that is commonly referred to as the epigraphic habit. Hundreds of thousands of such inscriptions are known from across the breadth of the Roman Empire, preserved because they were created of durable material or were reused in subsequent building. This volume (to be published by Brill in 2014) looks at another aspect of epigraphic creation and explores the presence of inscriptions in the private sphere. The types of inscriptions that occurred in private spaces tend to be far more portable, fragile, or ephemeral, and as such they are preserved in a much smaller quantity; in most instances, it is remarkable that they have survived at all. Yet from handwritten messages traced on wall-plaster to letters and symbols scratched on pottery, from domestic sculptures labeled with texts to displays of official patronage posted in homes, a range of inscriptions appeared within the private sphere in the Greco-Roman world. Chance finds, such as the graffiti etched into the floor in a house in classical Attica or a group of inscribed potsherds from a workshop in sixth century Crete, offer glimpses into the type of inscriptions that might be found in the private sphere in the Greek world. Archaeological sites of the Roman Empire present a wider variety, with inscribed domestic sculpture, bronze tablets, and graffiti written on the walls of homes; all together these offer a look into the types of text that might surround an individual at home. The chapters within this volume represent a spectrum of private spaces – from the household latrines that feature graffiti privatissimi to the patronage tablets that straddle the private/public divide, produced in duplicate copies so that one could be displayed in the home of the patronus while the other went on public display in the issuing city. The geographical areas included here as well, from Spain to Italy to Dura Europus, further reveal that writing in private spaces was very much a part of the epigraphic culture of the Roman Empire.

Ancient graffiti - hundreds of thousands of informal, ephemeral texts spanning millennia - offer ... more Ancient graffiti - hundreds of thousands of informal, ephemeral texts spanning millennia - offer a patchwork of fragmentary conversations in a variety of languages spread across the Mediterranean world. Cut, painted, inked or traced in charcoal, the surviving graffiti present a layer of lived experience in the ancient world unavailable from other sources. "Graffiti in Antiquity" reveals how and why the inhabitants of Greece and Rome - men and women and free and enslaved - formulated written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them as graffiti. The sources - drawn from 800 BCE to 600 CE - are examined both within their individual historical, cultural and archaeological contexts and thematically, allowing for an exploration of social identity in the urban society of the ancient world. An analysis of one of the most lively and engaged forms of personal communication and protest, "Graffiti in Antiquity" introduces a new way of reading sociocultural relationships among ordinary people living in the ancient world.

"Funerary and votive texts engraved on durable surfaces permeated the urban fabric of the ancient... more "Funerary and votive texts engraved on durable surfaces permeated the urban fabric of the ancient Mediterranean world during the Republican and Imperial periods of Roman history. Complete or fragmentary, legible or unreadable, transparent or ambiguous in meaning, hundreds of thousands of these inscriptions survive today as a reminder of a cultural phenomenon that pervaded Classical Graeco-Roman society and is known in the modern age as the epigraphic habit. For historians of the ancient world working today these public records provide invaluable insights into Roman culture.

Previous studies of tombstones and inscriptions dedicated to divinities have focused on methods of assigning names in Roman society, the age at marriage and death of demographic populations across the Roman Empire, relations of kinship, marriage, amity and dependence among elite and sub-altern families and communities, and the performance of acts in accordance with traditional forms of belief and custom. The present volume wishes to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the corpus of private Latin inscriptions from Roman Italy about the identity, social condition and cultural activity of men and women participating in the process of epigraphic commemoration and dedication. In particular, this study hopes to demonstrate that women participated as significantly as men in the process in a variety of ways and contexts usually regarded as prominently or exclusively male, and in certain circumstances left behind the trace or residue of a uniquely female perspective on their world.

To these ends, this book does the following: locate, identify, translate and interpret information inscribed as text and images in private and public places by women and men living in the cosmopolis of Rome under the rule of the early Caesars. The underlying argument is straightforward. In conjunction with a synthesis of modern theoretical and methodological approaches, historical analysis and interpretation of the inscriptions of ancient Rome can generate a radically new view of how and why ancient Roman men and women inscribed written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them. As part of such a perspective, this book situates the manner and subject of private and public female communication within the historical, cultural and linguistic contexts from which epigraphic practice emerged. Consequently, this study highlights and assesses the relationship between epigraphic representations of Roman culture and the nature of the society within which these representations - by and about women living in Rome – were produced.

By engaging as directly as theoretical and methodological criteria allow with a gendered alterity, this study of the epigraphic landscape in general, and private inscriptions in Latin in particular, will mesh more vividly with the social-linguistic resonances of the contextualized residue that survives. Throughout, an array of critical tools will be applied to the variety of selected burial and votive contexts – each situated as an assemblage of inscribed text, commemorative or dedicatory structure, and associated funerary or offering space. This should develop a refined perspective on ancient discursive practices specifically encompassing the intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity, and provide a comparative series of case-studies against which to test any of the current definitions of sexed identity, gender relations and social-cultural condition."

This volume explores the creation of ‘written spaces' through the accretion of monumental inscrip... more This volume explores the creation of ‘written spaces' through the accretion of monumental inscriptions and non-official graffiti in the Latin-speaking West between c.200 BC and AD 300. The shift to an epigraphic culture demonstrates new mentalities regarding the use of language, the relationship between local elites and the population, and between local elites and the imperial power. The creation of both official and non-official inscriptions is one of the most recognisable facets of the Roman city. The chapters of this book consider why urban populations created these written spaces and how these spaces in turn affected those urban civilisations. They also examine how these inscriptions interacted to create written spaces that could inculcate a sense of ‘Roman-ness' into urban populations whilst also acting as a means of differentiating communities from each other. The volume includes new approaches to the study of political entities, social institutions, graffiti and painting, and the differing trajectories of written spaces in the cities of Roman Africa, Italy, Spain and Gaul.

Articles cover a variety of periods of prehistory and antiquity − from British Iron Age numismati... more Articles cover a variety of periods of prehistory and antiquity − from British Iron Age numismatic iconography to rural and urban pottery production in Byzantine Palestrina/Arabia, from Livy to Apuleius, and Alexander to Agrippina − and showcase recent cutting-edge postgraduate research in the fields of literature and material culture.

Papers by Peter Keegan

Tenue est Mendacium. Rethinking Fakes and Authorship in Classical, Late Antique & Early Christian Works, 2021

The custom in the ancient world of fabricating inscriptions so as to confer credibility to otherw... more The custom in the ancient world of fabricating inscriptions so as to confer credibility to otherwise suspect or unreliable declarations of great age or importance of one kind or another is well known. This fraudulent practice continued into the post-classical era, reflected notably in thousands of counterfeit Latin inscriptions (the so-called falsae of Rome) manufactured from the Renaissance to the modern age. While this phenomenon has been discerned in the corpora of formal incised texts we categorize as religious, political, and social epigraphy , can the same be said with respect to the surviving residue of ephemeral inscriptions, i.e. graffiti)? To ascertain the degree to which the falsification of written messages on stone or metal may apply to the unofficial epigraphic discourse of antiquity, this chapter will examine a representative sample of graffiti found in ancient Pompeii, one of antiquity’s primary repositories of informal markings – texts scratched, inked, painted, or otherwise displayed on the durable surfaces of the southern Italian town’s civic and domestic urban spaces. A study of parietal inscriptions either bearing the names of male and female persons or implying the status, gender, or sexuality of those purporting to be their ordinatores and/or the auctores will produce a dataset of Latin graffiti texts signed or signified by particular individuals that may within the bounds of statistical likelihood be designated as authentic or invented, and by extension afford an opportunity to determine how this new corpus can enhance our knowledge and understanding of the reasons underlying, as well as the methods used to execute, the manufacture of false graffiti in 1st century BCE and CE Pompeii. [This is an abbreviated version; a full version of this article is available on request (peter.keegan@mq.edu.au).]

Written Space in the Latin West, 200 bc to ad 300

ABSTRACT The presence of inscriptions in and around cities of the Roman West tests two important ... more ABSTRACT The presence of inscriptions in and around cities of the Roman West tests two important boundaries of our modern understanding of what it meant to be a part of an oral-literate society and a participating member of a pervasive epigraphic culture. First, how important it is to recognize the relationship between words and images in ancient urban built environments. Second, how difficult it is – some would have it, impossible – to know how much men and women contributed to or took meaning from the epigraphic landscape. Exploring such traditionally slippery quantities as ‘the artist’, ‘the audience’, and ‘the viewer’, usually entails falling into the trap of inventing people’s identities. To address the epigraphic representation of Roman identity from a cultural perspective, this paper explores the contexts in which men and women set up burial monuments and inscriptions: family and collective tombs lining the roads of Republican and Imperial Rome. As contexts offering practical engagement with the relationships of art and language, of the real and imagined, Rome’s sepulchral roads and ritual spaces provide primary sites for investigation of ‘written space’ in the Latin-speaking Mediterranean.

Macquarie University ResearchOnline.

When the teacher of Ancient History in New South Wales first scans the listing of examinable cont... more When the teacher of Ancient History in New South Wales first scans the listing of examinable content relating to the Core Unit on the Cities of Vesuvius newly introduced for the 2006 Higher School Certificate, the usefulness of incorporating graffiti2 into a program of study as one of the range of available sources may not be readily apparent. This article aims to survey the nature of graffiti at the site of ancient Pompeii as a category of material culture incorporating written and archaeological features and as a useful primary and supplementary source for evidence about the economy, social structure, politics, religion and daily life in Roman Campania of the Republican and early Imperial historical period. This discussion will touch incidentally on issues regarding the limitations, reliability and evaluation of graffiti as a source and as evidence.

Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World, 2016

The Invention of Female Biography, 2017

This chapter is centred on my work as Latin Editor of Mary Hays’s Female Biography, and will expl... more This chapter is centred on my work as Latin Editor of Mary Hays’s Female Biography, and will explore how a felicitous combination of interdisciplinary approaches to historical research enabled the ventriloquized ‘voices’ of 30 ancient Roman women (from Agrippina the Elder to Veturia). This task has involved a detailed critical annotation in relation to the ancient testimony and a repertoire of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century references (inter alia, Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, the Biographium Femineum, LaCroix’s Les Femmes Célébrées); professional historical dialogue with a variegated scholarship across a range of academic institutions (American, Australasian and European); and informed theoretical perspectives from a spectrum of academic elds (gendered history, historical philology, feminist philosophy, post-structural literary critique). This work not only conrms my belief that it is the ongoing responsibility and duty of the historical researcher to pursue, capture, discover, create and transmit how knowledge and understanding of the ancient world is developed, managed and used; it also foregrounds the necessity for students of human history (ancient and modern) to always be open to different perspectives, methodologies and ways of thinking in order to advance our understanding of the nature of who and what we study.

Scholarship of the family in the ancient world embraces a group of people related by blood, marri... more Scholarship of the family in the ancient world embraces a group of people related by blood, marriage, law or custom: the nuclear family (a father, a mother, and their sons and daughters) or the extended family (kinship or tribal groups). Within the ambit of the latter category, careful study of the surviving epigraphic corpora of Roman Italy reveals certain groups of people who live together, groups that are similar to that extended group related by blood, marriage, law, or custom, but which have not often been directly acknowledged in the literature of ancient family studies. This under-examined category of extended family may be situated in relation to the etymological root of the Latin term familia, namely famulus/a (male/female slave); in other words, servile and freed groups living and working together within marked boundaries of industry, duty, companionship and affection. Inscriptions in civic, residential and occupational spaces identify the groups which display these relationships: fire-fighters in Ostia and the Roman capital; apprentices to service in the Palatine palace; and, of course, the servile familia within the households of republican and imperial Rome. This chapter will adduce a range of formal and informal epigraphic testimony to explore the extent to which various social groups in ancient Rome understood themselves in relation to the traditional markers of the extended family – legal formulations; kinship structures; marriage, divorce and children; and affective relations.

This chapter explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epi... more This chapter explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epigraphic spaces — specifically, the accretion of non-official graffiti within the urban fabric of ancient Pompeii between circa 120 BCE and 79 CE. The shift from an-epigraphic cultures to epigraphic cultures is not simply a matter of commissioning the carving of an inscription or scratching graffiti: it also demonstrates new mentalities regarding the use of language, the relationship between local elites and the rest of the population and between local elites and the imperial power. The creation and replication of written spaces also marks a radical departure for some pre-Roman communities in the West and a new medium for the expression of local statuses and identities. As importantly, graffiti inscriptions record communications in informal contexts using vernacular media, offering the possibility of writing history about people living in the cities of these times which does not depend solely on the views of the cultural elites surviving in the European manuscript tradition and in formal epigraphic contexts. By the same token, examining the words and images inscribed on an ancient city’s monumental fabric — its walls, doorposts, pillars, tombs, and so on — provides a means of assessing the manner by which and the degree to which ordinary men and women absorbed and exchanged culture and language through inscribed speech-acts under Roman rule. In consequence this essay examines the different trajectories of the creation and replication of discursive environments in a variety of locations within the urban fabric of Pompeii.

KEY WORDS
graffiti, non-official discourse, cultural space, Pompeii

Active learning techniques encourage – and even demand – that students become co-creators of thei... more Active learning techniques encourage – and even demand – that students become co-creators of their learning. The design of the teaching and learning activities and the assessment tasks requires students to participate in their learning. This guide will help educators move to a more active approach to learning. There are case studies and some excellent reading materials to guide and inspire you. All of the case studies have been trialled with students, and have been successful in achieving high student evaluation and good student outcomes.

Papers of the British School at Rome, 2007

Macquarie University ResearchOnline.

Chapter 11, Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World (Brill, forthcoming 2015)

This paper explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epigr... more This paper explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epigraphic spaces – specifically, the accretion of non-official graffiti within the urban fabric of ancient Pompeii between circa 120 BC and AD 79. The shift from an-epigraphic cultures to epigraphic cultures is not simply a matter of commissioning the carving of an inscription or scratching graffiti: it also demonstrates new mentalities regarding the use of language, the relationship between local elites and the rest of the population and between local elites and the imperial power. The creation and replication of written spaces also marks a radical departure for some pre-Roman communities in the West and a new medium for the expression of local statuses and identities. As importantly, graffiti inscriptions record communications in informal contexts using vernacular media, offering the possibility of writing history about people living in the cities of these times which does not depend solely on the views of the cultural elites surviving in the European manuscript tradition and in formal epigraphic contexts. By the same token, examining the words and images inscribed on an ancient city’s monumental fabric – its walls, doorposts, pillars, tombs, and so on – provides a means of assessing the manner by which and the degree to which ordinary men and women absorbed and exchanged culture and language through inscribed speech-acts under Roman rule. In consequence this paper examines the different trajectories of the creation and replication of discursive environments in a variety of locations within the urban fabric of Pompeii.

Chapter 10, Ancient Documents and their Contexts. First North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Brill 2015) 152-173

Varro reports that Gaia is ‘celebrated above all other names’ formed from the first or personal n... more Varro reports that Gaia is ‘celebrated above all other names’ formed from the first or personal name (praenomen) of the husband. Cicero tells us that the use of Gaia as a
‘typical woman’s’ name led to the fancy of lawyers that ‘every woman’ who entered into a kind of legal contract (coemptio) bore the name of Gaia. Plutarch conflates the misnomer by relaying the formula spoken by a newly espoused bride (under duress) to
her husband: ‘where you are Gaius, I will be Gaia’. Quintilian reifies the impression that Gaia is a typical name conventionally used of ‘any woman’ in his explanation of the retrograde C: ‘Gaius is denoted by the letter C, while the inverse means (a) woman’. It
would appear that the dominant Graeco-Roman discourse manufactures a signifier expressly suited to the symbolic transmission of a deeply embedded sociocultural premise: (a) Woman is (the) Inverse of (a) Man. This paper seeks to explore a single epigraphic manifestation of such a pervasive discursive formation: the use of retrograde C in certain inscriptions of late Republican and early Augustan Rome. The tantalising questions raised by epigraphic Gaia, in relation to the inscriptions belonging to the city of Rome and its environs (CIL VI), provide a fruitful point of entry into how ancient Mediterranean discourse represented and excluded individuals and groups on the margins of Roman society.

Chapter 3, Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300 (Bloomsbury Publishing) 49-64, Jul 2013

The presence of inscriptions in funerary contexts tests the boundaries of our understanding of wh... more The presence of inscriptions in funerary contexts tests the boundaries of our understanding of what it meant to be a part of an oral-literate society and a participating member of a pervasive epigraphic culture. To appreciate the significance underpinning this juxtaposition of social and cultural issues, we should consider the implications of a single question: Who made these inscriptions? Determining ‘who’ calls for the inquirer to examine how possible it was for any member of the ancient population to formulate – articulate, produce, and transmit – a written message within the extra-mural spaces of Rome’s funerary environment. The extent to which inscriptions seem to address interpretative issues of concern to the composer, the ancient society, and the modern researcher – for instance, the manner and subject of public commemoration – is a necessary addendum to the questions of literacy, epigraphic technique, and the sociolinguistic system in Classical antiquity. This finding must also address how accessible the location chosen was for any individual, and the degree of significance which that person attached to the context of memorialization. These points of inquiry lead the investigator to a discussion of modes of social mobility, kinds and numbers of intended audiences, and the thought processes, values, and beliefs shared by members of different communities under Roman rule.

Livy's Women. Crisis, Resolution, and the Female in Rome's Foundational History, 2021

Tenue est Mendacium. Rethinking Fakes and Authorship in Classical, Late Antique & Early Christian Works, 2021

Written Space in the Latin West, 200 bc to ad 300

Macquarie University ResearchOnline.

Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World, 2016

The Invention of Female Biography, 2017

KEY WORDS
graffiti, non-official discourse, cultural space, Pompeii

Papers of the British School at Rome, 2007

Macquarie University ResearchOnline.

Chapter 11, Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World (Brill, forthcoming 2015)

Chapter 10, Ancient Documents and their Contexts. First North American Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy (Brill 2015) 152-173

Chapter 3, Written Space in the Latin West, 200 BC to AD 300 (Bloomsbury Publishing) 49-64, Jul 2013

Chapter 3, Roman Slavery and Roman Material Culture, ed. M. George (University of Toronto Press)), 2013

This book chapter will consider Roman slavery in relation to the material culture associated with... more This book chapter will consider Roman slavery in relation to the material culture associated with the building on the Palatine hill in Rome generally recognized under the name of ‘Paedagogium’. The first part of this paper will look at the evidence of the numerous graffiti found in the Paedagogium as an index to the culture, educational levels, ethnicity and training of pre-pubescent, adolescent and older male slaves in the imperial household. Graphic variations in the orthography of the cursive script covering the walls of the Paedagogium reflect a diversity of instruction and cultural level among the writers. The onomastics of the ‘Paedagogium’ graffiti corroborate the contentions that the building was a complex housing slaves of the imperial epoch and that these slaves in large part came from various regions of the Empire. Some general reflections, derisive remarks and casual obscenities recur, testifying to gender- and age-structured sexual relations and hinting at a range of erotic practices between adult males and adolescent boys. The second part of this paper will discuss the degree to which social historians can make use of the evidence provided by the Paedagogium graffiti – for instance, to shed light on whether or not institutionalized education inculcated explicitly Roman cultural values within the social structure of Roman slavery – and if contemporary theory – specifically gender studies and queer theory – serves to illuminate or obscure the material realities of Roman slavery.

While Australian universities offers on-campus students a variety of learning and teaching spaces... more While Australian universities offers on-campus students a variety of learning and teaching spaces through which to embed the appropriate range of experiences, the same cannot always be said for distance-education students. This paper will examine the development and delivery of a practical approach to the problem of access as it affects induction and e-learning and teaching: the Ancient History Virtual Campus (AHVC). It is hoped that this outline of the AHVC project will demonstrate access in practice – in particular, how a coherent, immersive induction and student support program can make it possible to counter those feelings of isolation and lack of resources which are major problems for distance-education students and often discourage them from continuing their studies – and provide a model for the development of enriching, participatory learning experiences in online higher education.

Previous research identifies as crucial to successful online learning and teaching (eLT) transfor... more Previous research identifies as crucial to successful online learning and teaching (eLT) transformative pedagogical strategies. Transformative L & T is the process by which we call into question our taken-for-granted habits of mind or mindsets to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open and reflective in order to guide our actions. This process can be codified into three phases that effectively ‘close the L & T loop’: critical reflection (feedback), reflective discourse (evaluation), and action (learning and teaching quality). This paper will examine the validity of these elements of transformative learning in relation to a blended (on-campus/online) tertiary-level capstone unit and current pedagogical models of eLT. Identifying and analyzing transformative L & T principles embedded (explicitly and implicitly) in the current blended experience provides a range of learning ideas, beliefs, habits and assumptions – pointing to self-direction, metacognition, and collaborative learning as key eLT facilitators – from which a broader pedagogical template responsive to eLT needs can be developed.

Keywords: Transformative learning, Online learning and teaching, Action learning, Collaborative learning,
Critical reflection, Metacognition

In addition to the widely reported adultery committed by Julia prior to her banishment, Pliny rec... more In addition to the widely reported adultery committed by Julia prior to her banishment, Pliny records that Julia was seen to place a corona on the statue of Marsyas. While the accusations of adultery have been considered in regard to Augustus’ so‐called morality laws, or as the smokescreen for a conspiracy, the Marsyas incident has been neglected. However, the symbolism of the various traditions regarding Marsyas indicate that Julia was sending her father a powerful public message which was a factor in his decision to remove her from the city.

Chapter 9, Ancient Graffiti in Context (Routledge, 2010) 165-190

Of the significant contributions made by studies of ancient inscribed texts and images, few have ... more Of the significant contributions made by studies of ancient inscribed texts and images, few have dealt with cultural questions about literacy, orality and memory in the ancient Mediterranean. This is especially true in relation to graffiti-texts and images. To highlight the importance of epigraphic research in identifying modes of meaning-production and consumption within an oral-literate culture, this paper will test the claim that inscribed cursive and figural graffiti in Italy under Roman rule can serve as a suitable category of evidence. Specifically, by situating the need for men and women living in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum to define their personal and collective identities through graffiti and dipinti, this project will highlight the variety of social-cultural relationships among meaning-producers and consumers in republican and imperial Roman Italy. As these inscriptions record communications in informal contexts using vernacular media, they offer the possibility of writing history about people living in the cities of these times that does not depend solely on the views of the cultural elites surviving in the European manuscript tradition and in formal epigraphic contexts. By the same token, examining the words and images inscribed on ancient Italian city walls, doorposts, pillars, tombs, and so on, provides a means of assessing the manner by which and the degree to which ordinary men and women absorbed and exchanged culture and language through inscribed speech-acts under Roman rule.

This paper discusses the episode in the laudatio ‘Turiae’ of an elite Roman woman’s interaction w... more This paper discusses the episode in the laudatio ‘Turiae’ of an elite Roman woman’s interaction with the triumuir M. Aemilius Lepidus (LT 2.13-17). Scholarship of the last century has discussed this element of the LT from a variety of standpoints. None of these treatments has approached the description of the experiences and actions of the laudata from the perspective of the ancient consumer of information and meaning within the complete epigraphic environment of the inscription. I will look at the ways in which a contemporary audience perceived and understood the details of this episode in the life-history of the laudata in relation to the wider sensorium of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic cues comprising the funerary monumentum.

Mary Hays, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries (1803). Chawton House Library Series: Women’s Memoirs, ed. Gina Luria Walker, Memoirs of Women Writers Part III. Vol. VIII-X, 2014

Annotated entries in the Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays's groundbreaking Female Biogr... more Annotated entries in the Chawton House Library Edition of Mary Hays's groundbreaking Female Biography (1803) to be published by Pickering & Chatto (2013, 2014).

Encyclopedia of Ancient History, 2013

Information about Roman women is almost exclusively derived from male sources.

tome.co.nz, 2032

Page 1. ABSTRACTS Special Panel Discussion: Current Trends and Developments in Classical Language... more Page 1. ABSTRACTS Special Panel Discussion: Current Trends and Developments in Classical Languages, Classical Studies and Ancient History in Australian and New Zealand Secondary Schools [Monday, Session 3f] Presenters ...

What do material and documentary sources say about ancient attitudes toward men and women, gender... more What do material and documentary sources say about ancient attitudes toward men and women, gender and sexuality? What social purpose(s) might these sources have served? These are the kinds of questions which tax the student of social history in the ancient Mediterranean world, and these are the questions which this seminar on Gender, Sexuality, Body History will address. This seminar is designed

(a) to examine how men and women lived in the ancient world, the spaces they occupied, the roles they played and the laws which governed them;
(b) to understand how cultures in the ancient Mediterranean defined the categories of masculine and feminine and how these categories were deployed in the discourses of literature, politics, law, religion and medicine; and, finally,
(c) to consider how ancient conceptions of gender have shaped our contemporary views of male and female roles.

The seminar will also address the problems posed both by literary and non-literary source materials, and the question of how the disciplines of ancient history and classical studies have dealt with the issue of gender and sexuality in the past several decades.

Is there an epigraphic equivalent to the so-called curse-tablet? This paper aims to tease out the... more Is there an epigraphic equivalent to the so-called curse-tablet? This paper aims to tease out the implications of a singular, durable residue of ancient magic and superstition (CIL 6.20905). Does the inscribed text confirm or contest the conventional schema for organizing curse formulae? Can it be used as evidence for certain conventional or non-normative types of belief-system, civic credulity, and ritual practice? What cultural ‘realities’ are revealed by the stories it tells, the social relations it describes, and the terrible fate it invokes? A complementary aim is to attempt a gendered analysis of this non-canonical epigraphic trace.