ISAW Announces Graduate Conference: Reimagining Body and Space in the Ancient World

By Soraya Garcia
10/23/2025

Reimagining Body and Space in the Ancient World
March 5-6th, 2026

Keynote address by Dr. Claire Bubb, “Wombs in the World: The Bodies Behind the Texts.”

Questions about how the human body occupied, created, and experienced space motivate anthropological, archeological, historical, and philosophical approaches at all scales. This multidisciplinary conference seeks to develop an avenue for understanding the past through engagement with under-represented data, non-traditional methods of scholarship, and creative methods of presentation. The goal of this approach is to embrace the dissolving lines of disciplinary study, which the institute embodies daily, through the lens of familiar interdisciplinary topics. Embracing the humanity of the past challenges disciplinary expectations of scholarship, and questions of embodiment and agency have become guiding concepts in this pursuit across many different sub-disciplines interested in ancient world topics. Ultimately the bodies and spaces of the ancient world are interconnected and require a similarly interconnected approach, which we hope to foster in this conference. We seek to bring together graduate students reimagining the concept(s) of body and space, sparking conversation between their own and other disciplines.

With this call for papers, we invite graduate students working in all areas of ancient world studies and within all subdisciplines. The conference will be organized around several panels of related abstracts, with a following discussion among panelists. Students working in all topics related to bodies and spaces of the ancient world are invited to apply, and we are particularly excited to welcome abstracts which address the following topics:

  • Architectural Studies, Liminal Spaces, and Religious Spaces
  • Geography and Landscape Archeology
  • Bioarchaeology and Mortuary Archaeology
  • Medical History, Anatomy, and Theory
  • Personhood, Agency, and Cultural Identity
  • Phenomenology and Embodiment

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 19th, 2025. Applicants will be notified by January 15th, 2026.