Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference

The 25th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference Committee at AMNE invites you to attend our Spring 2025 conference, on the topic of “Nature and Artifice”.

The conference will be held in-person in Vancouver and via Zoom (hybrid format) on Friday, March 28, 2025, and will feature a keynote address (Thursday, March 27, 6pm) by Dr. Catherine Kearns, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

Papers will investigate any aspect of the ancient world relating to nature, artifice, or both. Some areas of interest include (but are not limited to) the following questions:

What do we mean by “nature” in a broad sense, or by the “nature” of a particular being? How do human-created “artificial” structures and human impact on nature shape the world, and how do humans, non-human animals, or ecosystems adapt in response? Is the relationship between humans, non-human animals, and the environment antagonistic, constructive, or both? Do the arts—such as literature, visual art, architecture, and music—merely imitate nature, or do they transcend it? Was there ever a truly “natural” or “artificial” way of life for ancient humans? Furthermore, when humans alter the natural world around them, do they also alter their own nature?

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Keynote Address by Dr. Catherine Kearns

Thursday, March 27th, 6:00 to 7:30 pm (attendance options of in-person, in IKB Peña Room, or via Zoom).

Talk Title and Abstract:

“States of nature-making in the ancient Mediterranean”

When in previous generations, scholars of antiquity might have pushed nature, ecology, and landscape to the analytical background, many now foreground the diverse mediations of material flows and non-humans in creating past social and cultural worlds. Doing so – across a rich range of extant sources and material culture – illuminates important cross-cultural variabilities of human-nature relationships and increasingly spotlights, even pokes or prods, the well-worn binary of nature/culture. We’re getting better, for example, at recognizing the give-and-take of nature-making: how human groups shape and are shaped by their environments. But whose natures are we narrating and historicizing? Which kinds of nature-making become legible, which ones are kept in the background? In deeper Mediterranean histories, in particular, we still confront an apolitical conception of nature as the substrate of human actions and values. In this talk, I forward the material and discursive politics inherent in past human-nature entanglements through a number of textual and archaeological examples, from state-controlled energy capture to gendered landscapes in early geographies. Each case aims to highlight an issue with how we study past workings of nature and how we choose the stories we tell.

Zoom Registration Link for Keynote Address:

Please complete the following registration form if you plan to attend the keynote address virtually: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/PXsB8f5zTsu4huGNRPj0DQ 

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Event Program

Click here to see the full AIGSC 2025 Program

Location: BUCH C203

9:00–10:15 AM: Panel One: Nature in Magic and Religion

Chair: Caroline Armstrong

• A Mantic Matter: Divination and Vital Materialism – Brendan Kay, University of British Columbia
• Magical or Mundane? An Ecological Approach to Human-Animal Relations in Minoan Crete – Madeline Topor, University of British Columbia
• Local Nymphs, Natural Landscape, and Identity: The Cases of Syracuse and Terina – Alessandro Intropido, University of British Columbia

10:30-11:45 AM: Panel Two: Nature in Settlement and Tourism

Chair: Jennifer Porter

• Breaking Down Barriers: A Fight for Accessible Archaeological Tourism in Greece – Paige Piché, University of British Columbia
• Settlement Pattern and Socio-Cultural Development of Communities in Northern Fars During the Bakun Period (South of Iran, 5th Millennium BCE) – Mohammad Hossein Taheri, University of British Columbia (Visiting International Research Student)
• Migration as Resilience: Multi-Scalar GIS Investigations of Levantine Late Bronze Age (1600–1100 BCE) Climate Migration – Caroline Armstrong, University of British Columbia

1:00-2:15 PM: Panel Three: Nature in Literature

Chair: Cristalle Watson

• The Songs of the Shuttle: Weaving and Poetry as One Language in Greek and Latin Literature – Gabrielle Roehr, University of Pennsylvania
• Nature as Enemy, Nature as Ally: Military and Landscape in the Aeneid – Madeline Cahn, New York University
• Fate and Nature in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura – Xiyue Zhang, Tufts University

2:30-4:00 PM: Panel Four: Nature in Medicine and Science

Chair: Fabrizio Ducati

• • The Deceptive Nature of the Female Form: Reading the Body in Ancient Medicine – Hannah Thompson, University of British Columbia
  • That Smarts! Octopus Attacks in Ancient Roman Literature: A Study of Their Perceived Intelligence in Ancient Rome – Chloë Franç Conley, University of British Columbia

Zoom Registration Link for Panel Presentations:

Please complete the following registration form if you plan to attend the panel presentations virtually: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/ji4g7e3pSh6DW3LyqGDtHA

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Acknowledgements

Caroline Armstrong, committee
Jennifer Porter, committee
Cristalle Watson, committee
Chloë Conley, volunteer
Lauren Gastineau, volunteer
Paige Piché, volunteer