The Graduate Group in Ancient History is delighted to announce John Ma as the Hyde Visitor for Spring 2023.
Every spring, the Graduate Group hosts a week-long visit by a distinguished ancient historian, made possible by a gift by Walter Woodburn Hyde (1870-1966, Professor of Greek and Ancient History at Penn 1910-1940). During their stay, the Hyde Visitor teaches several graduate seminars, meets with graduate students individually and in smaller groups, and delivers the formal Hyde Lecture.
John Ma is an ancient historian, teaching in the Classics Department at Columbia, having moved there in 2015 from a position in the sub-faculty of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at Oxford University. His main interests lie in the Hellenistic period. He has looked at the interaction between city and ruler, in a particular geographical context, Western Asia Minor, that can serve as a test-case (Antiochos III and the CIties of Western Asia Minor, 1999). One particular interest is civic culture, notably as expression of democratic possibility and social bargaining, which he explores in his monograph on Statues and Cities (2013) and his forthcoming synthesis on POLIS: Biography of a political and social form which argues for a "long Hellenistic" period (300 BCE-300 CE). The scholarly influences are perhaps obvious here: Fergus Millar's interest in local autonomy; Louis Robert's way of doing "epigraphy-with-historical geography", Philippe Gauthier's and Ivana Savalli's work on institutions...), as well as the theoretical and social situatedness of the questions (identity and culture as a way of shaping power; Pierre Briant's work on Achaimenid history, and area which the volume co-edited by J. Ma and C. Tuplin explores (Aršāma and his World, 2021), using the test case of some letters of the Achaimenid satrap of Egypt, Arshama. At the same time, the latter theme, combined with the recent anomie of our current age of anxiety, emphasizes how much more needs to be done in Hellenistic history, in bringing themes of exploitation and violence into the mix: as P, Brun writes, the epigraphical record focuses on the winners, the imperial elites and those corporate entities who had sufficient bargaining power and cultural capital to endure (at a price).
The Graduate Group looks forward to Dr. Ma's Hyde Visit, in which he says he"would like to gesture reflexively, at the possibility of a Hellenistic history 'beyond the pendulum', in which cultural shapes, social pressure and struggles for power are not competing stages in interpretive cycles, but multiple attempts at grasping complex historical situations."