This conference will be held in-person only and will take place at the NYU Silver Center for Arts & Science. It is free and open to the public, but advance registration is required. Links to register are below.
The NYU Center for Ancient Studies presents the Ranieri Colloquium on Ancient Studies Reimagining Ancient Worlds: New Stories of the Distant Past co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the Remarque Institute, the Archaeology Hub, and the Institute of Fine Arts.
Thursday, April 3, 2025 - Friday, April 4, 2025
NYU Silver Center for Arts & Science
31 Washington Place (accessible entrance)
Hemmerdinger Hall, 1st Floor
New York, NY 10003
It is comfortable to think about the ancient world through the lens of established disciplines and taxonomies: the study of Greek politics, Vedic philosophy and Egyptian art are touchstones in analysis of the past. Comparative and transdisciplinary investigations of ancient peoples and practices can juxtapose and question these divisions, analyzing how Greek and Roman urbanism might have been entangled and yet still discrete, how Nubian, Egyptian and other gods might interact in their worship, or how Assyrian and Zoroastrian cosmologies shared features and diverged. Yet comparative structures still assess the past by way of segregated worlds that were, in practice, far more fluid, fragmented, heterarchical and “intra-active”: features constituting themselves and ancient life even as they were (be)coming together.
This conference brings together established and emerging leaders in the conversation about how we can rethink the study of the distant past in radical ways. Subjects include the exchange and production of glass across the Sahara, plant life movement from Southeast Asia to Arabia and the Mediterranean, the bodily crafting of objects and the atrophy of object meaning across multiple continents, and much more. The speakers all recognize the powerful role that cultural conglomerates played, often through imperializing and colonizing practice, and yet they have found ways to look around their gravitational hold on history writing. The reimagined views presented here suggest endless other ways to organize sociocultural life, unbinding, fragmenting, and multiplying how we see these worlds. When appreciated for their potential, these views reveal just how partial and restrictive the work of ancient studies has been and the work still to be done.
THURSDAY, APRIL 3
RSVP FOR THURSDAY
5:00pm "Frameworks and De-Formations of Ancient Worlds"
keynote conversation
Introduction and moderator: John Hopkins (NYU / Institute of Fine Arts)
A conversation with Joy Connolly (American Council of Learned Societies), Oliver Harris (University of Leicester), Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University), and Josephine Crawley Quinn (University of Cambridge)
7:00pm Reception
FRIDAY, APRIL 4
RSVP FOR FRIDAY
TELLING STORIES OF ANCIENT WORLDS
SESSION I
Chair: Lara M. Sánchez-Morales (New York University)
9:45-10:30am "Crop Cultures in Convergence: Creating a 'Unified Contact Zone' in Ancient Afro-Asia"
Sureshkumar Muthukumuran (National University of Singapore)
10:30-11:15am "'In the Worldly Steppe': Pastoralists and the Limits of Sedentary Thought"
Lara Fabian (University of California, Los Angeles)
11:15-12:00pm "(Re)Conceptualizing Technological Invention in Sub-Saharan Africa"
Abidemi Babatunde Babalola (The British Museum)
12:00-1:00pm LUNCH
SESSION II
Chair: Subhashini Kaligotla (Columbia University)
1:00-1:45pm "Craft Production and Knowledge Exchange as Social Practice"
Braden Cordivari (NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World)
1:45-2:30pm "Nubia vs. Egypt? Movement, Social Difference, and Exchange in the First Millennium BCE Nile Valley"
Kathryn Howley (NYU Institute of Fine Arts)
2:30-3:00pm COFFEE
SESSION III
Chair: Greg Woolf (NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World)
3:00-3:45pm "Uncovering the Uncomfortable: Economies of Predation in the Ancient World"
Manuel Fernández-Götz (Oxford)
3:45-4:30pm "Fragmented Urban Anti-Structures From Europe to Western Asia"
Rubina Raja (Aarhus University)
4:30-5:30pm DISCUSSANT PANEL AND GENERAL DISCUSSION
Remarks led by session chairs