ISAW Announces Graduate Conference: Itinerancy and Agency across the Ancient World

Itinerancy and Agency across the Ancient World
March 13-14th, 2025

Keynote address by incoming ISAW Director Greg Woolf, “Makers and Stayers in Mediterranean cultural change: configurations of collaboration in the 1st millennium CE.”

Itinerancy has increasingly been recognised as a prominent feature of the ancient world, and a common experience of humans, ideas, and things alike. In this conference we hope to explore agency as it intersects with such itinerancy: for example, what motivated agents and consumers along trade networks, what drove the exchange of specialized knowledge, what compelled the migration of people across various spaces and boundaries. This conference hopes to embrace interdisciplinary and post-national approaches that may aid in reassigning agency to individuals, networks and objects that have been obscured by received historiographical traditions.

In this spirit, the conference aims to bring together the next generation of scholars of the ancient world for a dialogue about how and why we study the intersection of itinerancy and agency in the past. We invite graduate students working on any form of evidence from the ancient world that addresses these issues.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• Intention and agency in networks of exchange
• Cross-cultural transmission of materials and ideas
• Migration and diaspora
• Itinerant object histories
• Reception and appropriation of the ancient past across time and space
• Pedagogical approaches to the study of the ancient past

The conference will be hosted in person at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, in New York City.

Submissions are open to graduate students at any level. Each presenter will have 20 minutes to speak. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words. Please email your submissions as PDFs to isawstudentconference@gmail.com by December 22nd, 2024. Applicants will be notified by January 12th, 2025.