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Exhibition Lecture: I Call Upon You, Gods of the Night: Protecting against Witchcraft and Demons in Mesopotamia
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The ancient Mesopotamian world was populated with a wide range of demonic and monstrous creatures, all of which intersected with daily life in a variety of mostly-malignant ways. Most often, demons, or the chaotic figure of the witch, could cause serious harm, being associated with disease and illness, or even death, particularly in infants and young children.
Published
08/26/2026
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Exhibition Lecture: Cursing, Curing, Creating: The Culture of Magic in Ancient Egypt
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. For the ancient Egyptians, magic was not an illicit alternative to religion or a mysterious violation of the natural world. Heka—the force usually translated as “magic”—was woven into creation itself and provided gods and humans with the causative power to make things happen. Drawing on texts and objects featured in the ISAW exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World, this lecture explores how Egyptians used spoken spells, written words, images, amulets, ritual actions, and sacred substances to heal the sick, protect children, defeat enemies, communicate with the dead, and transform their spirits. Seen from an Egyptian perspective, cursing, curing, and creating were not separate domains but different expressions of a world in which magic was an expected part of everyday life.
Published
08/26/2026
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Exhibition Lecture: Cursed! Curator's Gallery Talk
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Join curator Jeffrey Spier for an in-gallery exploration of the exhibition Cursed! The Power of Magic in the Ancient World. Dr. Spier will discuss the exhibition’s key themes and engage participants in close-looking at a selection of exhibition highlights.
Published
08/26/2026
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Exhibition Lecture: Portable Prayers: Objects, Adornment, and Devotion in Jewish Antiquity
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Conventional studies of ancient Jewish prayer and its evolution focus primarily on recitations or performances of precatory texts, liturgy, or poetry once conducted inside Jewish homes, synagogues, and study halls. This talk adopts a different focus: it considers inextricable connections between the minds, hearts, and bodies of Jewish supplicants and the portable things that they once attached to their bodies with strings and cords, including inscribed amulets and phylacteries of various sorts.
Published
08/26/2026
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Burial and Betrayal
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The ancient Roman cemetery is often framed as the domain of the “well deserving,” as funerary monuments frequently formulaically assert. These dead were deserving of proper burial, of commemoration, and of the ongoing provision of offerings and other cult activities that both integrated them into the community of the dead and maintained their relationships with the living. But what might happen to the “badly deserving?” By examining select case studies of social betrayal documented in Roman cemeteries from the first three centuries CE, this talk will explore efforts at enforcing postmortem punishments against those perceived to have violated Roman social norms. It will argue that these stories of betrayal, while unique in their specifics, together illuminate the ways in which private individuals could seek to impose a form of afterlife exile upon those they deemed guilty of social transgressions.
Published
08/26/2026
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Exhibition Lecture
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. The body was a hugely popular subject of representation in ancient Egypt. But this talk will look at the bodies in Egyptian art that we now don’t see–those of the ancient Egyptian audience.
Published
02/04/2026
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Academic Year 2025-2026
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Exhibition Lecture
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture examines the origins and development of this technique, as well as how Rodin’s process of combining disparate parts opened onto a genre of remarkable assemblage sculptures that incorporate ancient vessels and other found elements.
Published
11/05/2025
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Academic Year 2025-2026
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Exhibition Lecture
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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.
Published
11/05/2025
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Academic Year 2025-2026
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RESCHEDULED: Exhibition Lecture
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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.
Published
11/05/2025
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Academic Year 2025-2026
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Exhibition Lecture
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This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Ancient Egyptian images of the body are at the same time both highly recognizable and foreign to the modern viewer. From impossible composite figures of human-animal hybrids to seemingly stiff and block-like human forms in sculpture, Egyptian depictions were meant not simply to capture a likeness, but to manifest powers in order to establish the presence of, and relations between, depicted entities.
Published
11/05/2025
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Academic Year 2025-2026