The ISAW Library launches new public events series

The ISAW Library launched a new public programming series this autumn with two highly successful events. This new series sponsored by the Library will organize public lectures, conferences, and workshops around the following themes:

• New books in areas of ISAW scholarly interest
• Digital humanities and computational approaches to ancient studies
• Research related to ancient literary, libraries, archives, and information
• Topics related to the intersection of ancient studies and modern libraries

These are all topics central to the mission and work of the ISAW library, which both supports research and teaching at ISAW and produces original research in many of these areas. The aim of this series, however is not only scholarly, but also communitarian: to provide a space for academics and interested members of the general public to come together to discuss current research in ancient studies from a variety of perspectives. 

The inaugural lecture was given to an audience of over 90 people on Sept. 12 by Toby Wilkinson, a historian who has specialized in bringing current research in Egyptology to the popular press, entitled Cleopatra’s inheritance: Ptolemaic Egypt revisited. The Ptolemies were the successors to Alexander the Great in Egypt after his conquest of the Persian Empire, ruling continuously from 323 to 31 BCE, when Cleopatra VII lost her kingdom to the Roman emperor Augustus in the final phase of the Roman civil war. Ptolemaic Egypt has been intensively studied by historians approaching the topic largely from the perspective of Hellenistic history, but has been somewhat neglected by Egyptologists. Having written about almost every phase of ancient Egyptian history, Dr. Wilkinson set his eyes on this final dynasty of Macedonian pharaohs. His lecture was a sneak preview of some of the ways in which he see Ptolemaic rule and culture inflected and influenced by Egyptian culture. If you missed the lecture, you may read his full account in The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, published by Bloomsbury this month.

The second lecture in the series was, coincidentally, also on an topic in Egyptian history. Prof. Sabine Huebner was a member of ISAW's first cohort of Visiting Research Scholars (2007/2008) and is now Professor of Ancient History in the University of Basel and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University for the 2024-2025 academic year. She returned to ISAW on Oct. 21 to share some of her current research on climate in the Roman world with a presentation entitled Imperial Waters: Unraveling the Impact of Nile Floods on Roman Egypt and the Empire. Her work revolves around finding ways to quantify the historical levels of the Nile flood during the Roman period (roughly 31 BCE to 300 CE), relate this to our emerging picture of wider climatic conditions in the ancient Mediterranean and Africa, and show how the Roman regime responded to both short-term, local environmental crises (e.g., low Nile floods or drought) and longer term environmental change (e.g., desertification or global changes in temperature or precipitation patterns). 

The series continues next term with a book talk by Prof. Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) on March 12, 2025, who will be presenting research related to her forthcoming book Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale University Press). This talk will be in person at ISAW. For details and information about registration, please follow this link.

For more information generally about public programming from the ISAW Library, please visit our website, where one can find details both about upcoming and past events.