https://isaw.nyu.edu https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/museum-mile-festival-2026 On Tuesday, June 9, 2026 between 6 and 9 pm, join ISAW and our neighbors for the 48th annual Museum Mile Festival! 2026-05-21T16:50:03Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-early-belief-systems This workshop is being organized by the OER Project and the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. It 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. Early belief systems weren’t just priests, temples, and lists of gods to memorize. Religion was embedded in every aspect of people's lives—at home, in the marketplace—and it informed everyday decisions. 2026-03-26T13:19:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rostovtzeff-lecture4-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series will consider current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:57Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-digital-approaches-to-global-art-history 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 uses the prompt of a newly started digital project to consider how large scale narratives and individual objects can be integrated into curriculums and into classroom experiences. The project is Global Approaches to Early Representations of the Human Figure, currently browseable at https://gaerhf.org 2026-01-23T21:02:52Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rostovtzeff-lecture3-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series will consider current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:28Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rostovtzeff-lecture2-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture series considers current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:14Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rostovtzeff-lecture1-series-2026 This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This lecture begins with considering current archaeological evidence for the emergence of mixed farming in western Asia, its dispersal and establishment across Europe and the long-term creativity and resilience of early farming households and communities. 2026-02-19T17:27:05Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/the-example-of-the-human-figure-heath NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this lecture has been canceled. We hope to reschedule the lecture for a later date and will post more information here when we're able to. 2026-03-23T13:15:03Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-power-of-monsters PLEASE NOTE: Due to unforeseen circumstances, this workshop has been postponed. The new date is March 17th, 2027, at 5:30pm (Eastern Time). We apologize for any inconvenience. The 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. Sphinxes, lions, griffins, winged demons, angels, chimeras of all sorts are some of the most captivating and enduring images of Mediterranean antiquity. Monsters are found across in objects of all sizes, from tiny scarab amulets to monumental statues, across the region. They were part of the visual imaginary of people in antiquity, cutting across regions, periods, social classes, and communities. 2026-03-11T13:40:58Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/the-sensorial-audience-rodin-egypt 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. 2026-02-05T00:35:32Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/archaeology-history-of-lyktos 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. 2026-01-06T21:18:24Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/the-egyptian-body 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. 2026-02-22T21:19:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/Lived_Religion_Polytheism_Monotheism_Ancient_Near_East 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. 2026-02-23T17:41:47Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/beyond-midas-phyrgia 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? 2025-12-19T15:54:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-broken-pots 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. 2026-01-21T16:47:33Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/merv-to-dehistan 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. 2026-01-27T16:23:01Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/caress-of-rodins-fingers 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. 2026-01-27T16:50:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/no-count-of-time-rodin 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. 2026-01-06T15:20:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-rodins-egypt-in-person-workshop 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. 2025-12-17T18:28:10Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-rodins-egypt-virtual-workshop 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. 2025-12-17T17:42:26Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/living-images-ancient-egypt 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. 2025-11-05T19:47:55Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rodins-exhibition-drawing-workshop 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. 2025-11-26T16:01:43Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/spengler-natures-greatest-success 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. 2025-07-31T15:20:53Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-state-religion-mediterranean-mesopotamia 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. 2026-01-16T16:36:00Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/19th-annual-leon-levy-lecture This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. In the 10th century BCE, the formerly grand kingdom of Assyria consisted only of what is today northern Iraq and centered on the three cities Assur, Nineveh (modern Mosul) and Arbela (modern Erbil). 2025-09-17T17:29:31Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/rodins-egypt-gallery-talk This event will take place in person. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Please join us as Carl Walsh, ISAW Assistant Curator, hosts a conversation with Bénédicte Garnier, Musée Rodin, in the gallery for a behind the scenes look at Rodin’s Egypt. Benedicte and Carl will address the themes of the exhibition, discuss Rodin’s sculpture and his Egyptian antiquities on display, and explore comparative perspectives on the representation of the human. 2025-10-28T20:58:21Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/etaw-temple-and-gymnasium 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. Belief systems around the body have a great influence on how societies conceptualize themselves, others, and their divinities. For the ancient world, the idealized bodies of gods and heroes, immortalized in flawless marble, have long defined our vision of Greece and Rome, but beyond these perfect forms lies a more complex story. This workshop delves into the lived reality of the body in antiquity, exploring how beliefs surrounding beauty, fitness, medicine, and disability shaped societies. 2026-01-16T16:25:16Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/from-samarkand-to-samarra This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. This talk will explore some of the questions and controversies surrounding the deployment of these Turkish troops and its consequences, drawing upon a contemporary literary work recently translated by the speaker, "The Turks and the Caliphal Army," by the celebrated Arabic writer al-Jahiz (d. 868). 2025-11-03T16:30:54Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/vonreden-beyond-silk-road This lecture will take place in person at ISAW. Prof. von Reden will offer alternative ways of thinking about why we find Chinese silk in Palmyra, Egyptian glass vessels in Afghanistan, and Roman coins in Thailand and Vietnam. 2025-10-15T14:20:13Z Event https://isaw.nyu.edu/events/open-house-2025 ISAW's open house for prospective doctoral students will take place online. Registration is required; click through for the registration link. Zoom information will be provided via confirmation email to registered participants. The event will include an opportunity to meet the ISAW faculty; an information session about our academic program; a Q&A session with current students; and sessions on archaeology, digital humanities, exhibitions, and the library at ISAW. 2025-07-08T16:02:10Z Event