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.”
We invite graduate students from a variety of disciplines focused on the ancient world 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
We welcome submissions from graduate students in all fields related to the ancient world, including Classics, Religious Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Art History, Archaeology, Philosophy, and Anthropology. Graduate students interested in presenting a paper should submit a 250-300 word anonymized abstract in addition to their name, affiliation, and paper title via this Google Form by December 15, 2025. Presentations should be 15 minutes in length.
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
Talk Title and Abstract: TBA
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
TBA
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