Lecture Program & Archive

Dr. Jerolyn Morrison
Lecturer of Art History
Baylor University

March 27, 2025
5:00pm
Haury 215

Minoan Lentils Recipe (PDF)

This talk will examine the terracotta figurines of women and mothers with babies from Neo-Babylonia (southern Iraq) and Judea (modern Israel) in the mid 1^st millennium BCE. This figurines, especially the Judean Pillar Figurines, have been the subject of a huge amount of scholarly debate, particularly focused on the function of the figurines and the woman’s identity (Is she a goddess? A human? A concept, like fertility?). This talk will instead explore the social meaning of the incredibly high level of standardization seen in these figurines, suggesting that their repetitiveness was a role model for a tightly restricted range of identity options for living people. This talk will argue that the idea that “all happy families are alike” was a trauma response that helped these societies rebuild after the devastating conquests of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

Co-sponsored by the AIA, the Departments of History, Religious Studies and Classics, the Center for Judaic Studies, and the School of Anthropology. Reception with light refreshments and snacks with accompany the talk.

Dr. Stephanie Langin-Hooper (Associate Professor and Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair of Hellenic Visual Culture, Southern Methodist University)
Haury 215, UA Main Campus
March 18, 2025 at 5:00pm

This talk focus on how ancient Greek communities on the island of Crete thought about their island’s past. I discuss several case studies of engagement with older landscape features and ways of life, including the construction of megalithic buildings in the countryside, the use and display of non-Greek inscriptions, and open-air ritual practice at significant locations. Material interactions with real or imagined pasts were key strategies for consolidating power during a period of demographic growth, competition for resources, and emerging forms of social inequality in the seventh through the fifth centuries BCE.

Dr. Grace Erny (Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, University of California at Berkeley)
216 Haury, UA Main Campus
February 20, 2025 5:00 pm