Join us for AMNE’s 26th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference.
This year’s Keynote Address will be given by Daniel C. Smith, Assistant Professor of Classics at Whitman College.
Dr. Daniel Smith, Assistant Professor of Classics at Whitman College
When: Thursday, February 26th, 2026, from 5:30-7pm.
Where: Dodson Room (302) IKBLC
Event title: Body Politics: Healing, Cursing, and Somatic Change in the Roman East
Abstract:
This talk explores how rituals of somatic transformation shape discursive formations of the body in the Ancient Mediterranean. Focusing on two disparate (and seldom compared) ritual phenomena, the talk puts healing temples of Asklepios (like those at Epidauros and Pergamon) and curse tablets found across the Mediterranean into conversation to interrogate their assumptions and assertions about bodily vulnerability and the more than human powers that give shape and meaning to bodily difference. Such a ritual landscape helps us ask new questions of literary accounts of transformed bodies, like the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, and prompts a reconsideration of the categories we employ in the study of ancient embodiment.