Recent Events

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.

NOTE: The time and format for this lecture have been updated as a result of blizzard conditions in New York. This lecture will take place at 1pm (Eastern Time) on Zoom. 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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.

This workshop will take place in person at ISAW. 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 in-person workshop invites teachers to discover the profound impact of ancient Egyptian art on the French master sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), through both the sculptors works and through the Egyptian antiquities he collected. Throughout the workshop you will take part in a series of object-based learning activities that explore how Rodin studied ancient Egyptian statuary and reliefs, which subsequently fed into his own practice and revolutionary approach to the human form.

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 online workshop invites teachers to discover the profound impact of ancient Egyptian art on the French master sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), through both the sculptors works and through the Egyptian antiquities he collected. Throughout the workshop you will take part in a series of object-based learning activities that explore how Rodin studied ancient Egyptian statuary and reliefs, which subsequently fed into his own practice and revolutionary approach to the human form.

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.

Please join illustrator and teaching artist Joan Chiverton for an afternoon of sketching and watercolor in the galleries in conjunction with our new exhibition Rodin’s Egypt. Develop your drawing skills and discover a new way of seeing the human form, as you sketch masterpieces from Rodin’s collection of Egyptian antiquities and masterpieces made by the sculptor.

The domestication of plants in prehistory allowed humanity to demographically expand, form dense population congregations (urbanism and social hierarchies), and advance the arts and sciences. For millennia, humans drove the evolution of domestication traits in crops and animals. Archaeologists, ecologists, and geneticists are all working to develop new theories about how domestication in antiquity occurred; one of these theories – the ecological release hypothesis – suggests that crops and animals evolved traits of domestication as a response to humans simply removing predators and herbivores. Dr. Spengler will briefly explore a few key themes in this theory and the rich history of domestication and culture, which he traces in his recent book, Nature's Greatest Success: How Plants evolved to Exploit Humanity.