Dancing for Trees, Gods, and Kings: Ritual Performance in Iron Age and Archaic Cyprus
My dissertation investigates ritual performance in Iron Age and Archaic Cyprus by looking at terracotta representations of performers dedicated in sanctuaries. I analyze those votives by placing them within their archaeological contexts and applying tools of performance theory, assemblage theory, and New Materialist ontologies. My project has two main sections; the first part is a wholistic study of performance and ritual activity at the Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates at Kourion, where I bring together many strands of archaeological evidence to access the full picture of ritual experiences. In the second part of my dissertation, I turn beyond Kourion to investigate whether there are patterned variations in performance type across Cypriot sanctuaries.
The Senatorial Experiment: Writing and Political Culture after 96CE
The project will focus especially on writing as an instrument of political change. It will explore how the experience of Domitian’s final years, together with memories of earlier crises such as the civil wars of 69 CE, supplied historical and living exempla through which political agents, at the same time authors, could interpret the present and formulate expectations for the future. The project focuses on the ways in which literary production itself becomes a form of political intervention in this stage of the principate. The works of Tacitus, Pliny, and Frontinus, considered alongside authors such as Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, and Epictetus, will be used to investigate ideas on libertas, auctoritas, expertise knowledge, oratory, and how they shape the dynamics between different constituents of the principate. Rather than assuming that these texts reflect an imperial ideological program, the project aims to consider their authors as political agents whose literary activity may have actively contributed to the construction of new norms of conduct.
Considering also the monuments, coinage, and other evidence of this period, this dissertation hopes to reconstruct the years after 96 CE as a period in which the conventions of the principate continued to be open to reinterpretation in sustained attempts to redefine how existing institutions and relationships should operate: what made a good emperor, what constituted useful and honorable senatorial action, what forms of political speech were legitimate, and where senatorial authority could reside within an imperial system. More broadly, it suggests that this decade could be understood as a significant moment in the cultural history of the High Empire, in which engagement with the recent past shaped evolving understandings of Roman political life.
Deploying Connections and Navigating Uncertainty in First-Century Judea, 6-66 CE
This dissertation examines the communal and personal relationships that undergirded the administration of provincial Judea from 6–66 CE, and is grounded in a unique constellation of sources unattested in any other provincial context elsewhere in the Roman world. In centering the relationships between actors within these sixty years of provincial Judean rule, I deliberately sidestep the revolt of 66, and instead interrogate the strategies and decisions employed by those within the province. This project takes an inherently interdisciplinary approach, contextualizing case studies from Josephus and the New Testament with a wide range of theological and apocalyptic texts, as well as numismatic evidence, to encapsulate the array of perspectives and strategies that enabled interactions between local communities, local leadership, and provincial authorities. This re-framing is embedded within the wider field of New Imperial Studies, and moves past the unhelpful dichotomy of collaboration or resistance to imperial rule, instead emphasizing the highly local and interpersonal contexts within which Judean communities experienced, facilitated, and even challenged the provincial administration. This project thus contributes to larger questions about the localized nature of Roman imperial rule, and facilitates comparative analysis between Judea and other provincial contexts across the Mediterranean. It also challenges long-standing assumptions about the nature of apocalyptic theologies in Judea, providing an avenue for understanding these works as not simply anti-imperial, but as themselves local mechanizations of imperial authority.
The Elite Networks of the Seleucid Empire
In previous studies, the Seleucid Empire has been investigated through the perspectives of either the royal dynasty or the local communities under its control. However, in this dissertation, I argue that an alternative approach exists. Instead of focusing on the royal dynasty or local communities, I investigate the Seleucid Empire through the perspective of the imperial elites who inhabited the royal courts, served as garrison commanders, and managed estates. The imperial elites performing various roles formed an extensive network that spanned the length of the Seleucid Empire. This dissertation, by avoiding a top-down perspective, explores how the imperial elites interacted with members of the royal dynasty, other elites in the network, and the many different types of communities that they exercised influence over. I argue that such interactions had a wide range of outcomes for the imperial elites who attempted to acquire and maintain their social capital by various means within this competitive space. This dissertation relies upon a wide range of archaeological, epigraphic, numismatic, and literary sources. Each category of evidence offers a different perspective on the activities and behaviors of the imperial elites across the expanse of the Seleucid Empire.
Human-Seismic Histories of the Southeastern Aegean in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
My dissertation examines the lived experience of seismicity in the Hellenistic and Roman southeastern Aegean, arguing that earthquakes were not merely episodic catastrophes but persistent environmental conditions with which ancient communities lived. Focusing on the Dodecanese, nearby islands, and the adjacent coast of southwest Turkey from the late third century BCE to the mid-second century CE, the project challenges the longstanding scholarly emphasis on destructive, high-magnitude earthquakes. Instead, it reconstructs a seismic landscape characterized by frequent small- to moderate-magnitude events punctuated by less frequent major earthquakes. Drawing on literary and epigraphic texts, archaeological evidence for damage, repair, rebuilding, and occupation, and geological data on fault systems and seismic periodicity, the dissertation examines how seismicity shaped knowledge, practice, and memory. It considers ancient explanations and metaphors for earthquakes, religious practices ranging from preventive rituals to ex voto dedications, the incorporation of seismicity into civic and political institutions, and the rebuilding and commemoration of earthquake-affected communities. By bringing cultural history, archaeology, and geology into dialogue, the project develops a multi-scalar account of human-seismic interaction that centers local experience and the variability of seismic events. Ultimately, it reframes ancient seismicity as an ongoing, culturally mediated relationship between people and their environments, offering a new framework for understanding geohazards within the environmental history of the ancient Mediterranean.