The 26th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference (AIGSC) committee of the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies (AMNE) at the University of British Columbia is issuing a call for papers for our Spring 2026 conference on “Bodies and Embodiment.”
Graduate students from a variety of disciplines focused on the ancient world were invited to submit abstracts for our upcoming conference, which will be held both in-person in Vancouver and via Zoom (hybrid format) on Friday, February 27, 2026. The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. Daniel Smith, Assistant Professor of Classics at Whitman College, scheduled for the evening of Thursday, February 26th.
Bodies and Embodiment: The body, both material and symbolic, is central to how people in the ancient world understood themselves and others as a site of meaning-making and identity. Embodiment invites inquiry not only into physical bodies, but also into lived experience, social identity, and materiality. This year’s theme asks participants to consider how ancient people conceptualized, represented, and interacted with bodies—human, divine, and otherwise. What does it mean to be embodied in a particular time and place? How did people in the past mark and navigate difference through the body in terms of gender, age, ability, class, ethnicity, or status? What role did bodies play in performance, ritual, and religion? How were bodily norms constructed, idealized, or subverted in ancient texts and visual culture? How is the boundary between body and soul, self and other, or divine and mortal constructed or contested?
Papers can investigate any aspect of the ancient world relating to bodies and embodiment through material, visual, textual, or theoretical approaches. Some areas of interest include (but are not limited to) the following topics:
- Representations of bodies in ancient art, sculpture, and iconography
- Gendered, aged, disabled, or othered bodies in ancient texts or visual culture
- The divine or sacred body in religious texts and ritual practices
- The body in ancient medicine, science, or magic
- The bioarchaeology of the body
- Philosophical conceptions of the body and soul
Submissions for this Call for Papers are now closed.
If you have any questions, please reach out to amne.grad.conference@ubc.ca.
Keynote Address by Dr. Daniel Smith
Dr. Daniel Smith, Assistant Professor of Classics at Whitman College
Body Politics: Healing, Cursing, and Somatic Change in the Roman East
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.
Daniel Charles Smith is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Whitman College. He earned his Ph.D. in Ancient Mediterranean Religion from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. His teaching focuses on religion in the Ancient Mediterranean world, including the social history of Ancient Jews and Christians, ancient formations of disability, ethnicity and other embodied differences, and the role of imperialism in religious discourse and practice. He also teaches Greek and Latin courses in the Department of Classics.
Drawing on diverse literary and material evidence from the Roman East, his scholarship explores the construction and deployment of embodied difference in the context of religion in the Ancient Mediterranean world. His first book, An Exotic Apocalypse: Revelation and the Appropriation of Judaism in the Roman Empire (Penn State University Press, 2026), investigates the ways imperial and material processes shaped the appeal and suspicion of exotic religion in the Roman East, with particular attention to the New Testament Apocalypse of John. His current research explores rituals of healing, cursing, and somatic change within the literature and material culture of Roman and Late Antique worlds.
Event Program
10-10:05 Conference Introduction
10:05-11:20 Sensory Medicine
10:05-10:25 Dissection in Islam and the Galenic Solution – Sunhao Zhang
10:30-10:50 Divine Prescription: Eye Disease and Vision in the Oracular Lamellae from Dodona – Tamara Di Marco
10:55-11:15 Goiter & Garum: Iodine Re-Distribution in Roman Gaul – Helen Ambrose
11:30 – 12:45 Metaphorical Bodies
11:30-11:50 Yahweh’s Burning Nose is All the Rage: “Anger” and Memory in the Hebrew Bible – Nicole Tombazzi
11:55-12:15 Plutarch’s Naked Souls: Platonic Ideas of Psychic Embodiment in the Myth of De Sera Numinis Vindicta – Reya George
12:20-12:40 The Chorus of Dancing Stars in Euripides’ Electra – Zhiyuan Wang
1-2 Close for LUNCH
2-3:15 Performative Gender
2-2:20 Desire and danger: Medea’s and Cleopatra’s bodies as ekphraseis in Ovid, Philostratus the Younger and Lucan – Laura Nardulli & Altomare Distaso
2:25-2:45 Soranus and the Unmaking of Roman Mothers – Misa Nguyen
2:50-3:10 ša-rēši in Neo-Assyrian Palace Reliefs: Gender, Masculinity, and Idealized Representation – Anna Selden
3:30 – 4:40 Collective Identity
3:30-3:50 Bodies Awakened: The Sensual, the Divine, and the Ecstasy of Both – Anika Sosa
3:55-4:15 Achaians in the Greek West: How The Achaian Poleis of Southern Italy Embodied Achaian Identity – Alessandro Intropido
4:20-4:40 When is a Scar not a Scar? Reclaiming the Captive Body in Republican Rome – Sarah Mark
4:40-4:45/50 Conference Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Chloë Franç Conley, MA in Ancient Culture, Religion, and Ethnicity, committee
Lauren Gastineau, MA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, committee
Lucas Pinheiro, MA in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, committee
Harmony Powell, MA in Ancient Culture, Religion, and Ethnicity, committee
Madeline Topor, PhD Student in Classical Archaeology, committee