ISAW Members Attend the Joint AIA/SCS Conference

In early January 2017, the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies will hold its joint annual meeting in Toronto. ISAW will be very well represented this year, with faculty, students, staff found throughout the program. Here is a guide to ISAW presentations and activities at AIA/SCS 2017:

ISAW Director Emeritus, Roger Bagnall, concludes his term as SCS President at the Toronto meeting and will be hosting a Presidential Panel on "Digital Publications and the Future of Classics." ISAW Professor Sebastian Heath will contribute to the panel discussion with a paper entitled "Digital Publication within an Academic Unit: A Case Study." The panel will be held on Friday evening from 5:00-7:00pm.

An exciting addition to this year's SCS program is Ancient MakerSpaces, an all-day workshop on digital tools, resources and publication in Classical studies organized by ISAW Head Librarian, David Ratzan, and Assistant Research Scholar, Patrick J. Burns (SCS Workshop, Saturday 8:30am-4:00pm). Among the workshops being offered at Ancient MakerSpaces is one called "Make Your Own 3D Models" led by Sebastian Heath (Saturday 10:50-11:35am). David will be assisting his colleague Rodney Ast in leading a workshop on the new Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, and, in the workshop's final hour, Patrick will moderate a panel discussion on the "State of Digital Classics."

ISAW Visiting Assistant Professor Emily Cole will present a paper entitled "Recent Results from the Graeco-Roman Village of Qarah el-Hamra in Fayum, Egypt" along with Bethany Simpson of the Getty Research Institute at the session entitled "The Eastern Roman Empire: Recent Field Work" (AIA Session 1F, Friday 8:00-10:30am). ISAW graduate students Irene Soto and Georgios Tsolakis are both presenting papers at the Joint AIA/SCS Colloquium on "Sovereignty and Money": Irene will deliver her paper "When Sovereignty is Not Enough: Money Supply and ‘Illegal’ Coin Production in Fourth-Century C.E. Egypt" and Georgios will deliver "Owing Money to the Athenian State: Epigraphical Evidence for Public Debt in Classical and Hellenistic Athens." (AIA Session 4E / SCS Session 30, Saturday 8:00-10:30am)

The program also includes the work of past ISAW Scholars. Jinyu Liu of Depauw University, will speak about "Confronting Globalization of Classics" at a session entitled "The Impact of Immigration on Classical Studies in North America" organized by the SCS Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (SCS Session 46, Saturday 1:45-4:45pm). Ian Rutherford of the University of Reading will be a respondent for the session "God the Anthropologist: Text, Material and Theory in the Study of Ancient Religion" (SCS Session 25, Friday 1:45-4:45pm).

Finally, as announced on the ISAW blog last month, the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places, will be recognized by the AIA with an award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology, for  its "work in creating an essential component of the scholarly digital infrastructure that is vital to facilitating academic research in the 21st century." Tom Elliott, Associate Director for Digital Programs at ISAW and Pleiades Managing Editor, will be on hand to accept and deliver remarks about this honor at the AIA Awards Ceremony, which will be held Friday night from 5:00-7:00pm.

The 2017 Joint Meeting of the AIA and SCS runs from Thursday, January 5, to Sunday, January 8. Preliminary programs for both meetings are available online: the AIA program can be found here and the SCS here.