Prof. Ian Rutherford (PhD Oxford University) teaches in the Classics Dept. at Reading, England. He has published widely on ancient Greek poetry and religion, with a special focus on religious networks and sacred travel. His most recent book is "State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers in Ancient Greece. A Study of Theoria and Theoroi" (Cambridge, 2013). He has also worked extensively on connections and interactions between Greece and the other ancient cultures of Western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, including Egypt. He believes strongly that we understand these cultures best by studying them alongside each other.
At ISAW he will be working on connections between Greece and the numerous cultures of ancient Anatolia, especially the Hittites and Luwians. He will be looking in particular at the religious systems of these early Anatolian cultures, which have become much better understood in recent decades thanks to the publication of new texts. He will be examining the extent to which the established way of looking at ancient Greek religion needs to be reassessed in the light of such new advances, and he will be trying to develop new models for understanding the relationship between the religious systems of the region.