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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture explores how Rodin created the same tactile, intimate viewing experience with his sculptures of dancers, including his Nijinsky (1912). Designed to be held in the hand rather than fixed on a base, this sculpture instantiates an encounter with the viewer’s body that is both mobile and sexualized, in deliberate homage to Vaslav Nijinsky’s scandalous 1912 ballet Afternoon of a Faun.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. In this lecture, Aydogdy will present an overview of the Sasanian-period sites extending from Merv to Dehistan and argue that southern Turkmenistan was not a peripheral zone but rather an active frontier where imperial, regional, and local dynamics intersected.

This workshop will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. Expanding the Ancient World is a series of professional development workshops and online resources for teachers. This workshop is designed for high-school educators seeking to incorporate archaeological evidence into their teaching of the ancient Mediterranean in concrete, accessible ways. It introduces ceramics as a uniquely powerful category of material culture for classroom use: abundant, visually legible, and deeply informative about trade, technology, daily life, and social organization.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This presentation reviews the archaeological evidence for these two strongly divergent viewpoints, considering the scholarly traditions in which they are embedded and, importantly, what is at stake in each. Since the time of the Greek philosophers, Anatolia has served as the setting for metaphorical discourses on power, authority, legitimacy, and even human nature: how have these debates influenced archaeological interpretation?

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This talk will explore how and why that was so, offering several hypotheses for why Egyptian figural art became central to the imagining of this complex psychological concept. The talk––paying special attention to Rodin’s self-described “Egyptian colossus,” his 1898 monument to Honoré de Balzac––will also probe Rodin’s highly distinctive approach to this widespread association between Egyptian art and the formal expression of the human potential for unconscious thought.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. In my talk I am going to argue that the rise of so-called monotheistic religions begins nearly five hundred years before the Common Era and that individual identity and self-definition in relation to the social community – human and divine – was primarily a process of experience and lived practice in particular social political, economic, and religious settings. It is the collapse of these settings that paved the way for the emergence of new forms of religiosity.

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Celebrated by Homer, considered as the birthplace of god Zeus by Hesiod, and identified as the cradle of the Spartan constitution by Aristotle, Lyktos boasts an unusually rich literary and epigraphic record. The lecture offers an integrated analysis of this record and the wide-ranging archaeological discoveries made by ISAW/NYU’s team to shed light on Lyktos for roughly a millennium, i.e. from its probable foundation ca. 1000 BCE, to the monumentalization of part of its acropolis ca. 100 CE. Emphasis is placed on the rich finds from settlement and burial areas of the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, which generate exceptional insights into the archaeology and history of a Greek community of the period, and raise important methodological issues over the archaeological visibility of an alleged Dark Age.