The Rostovtzeff Lectures: a series of four invited lectures delivered at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in Spring 2025 as part of the series named after the ancient historian and archaeologist Michael I. Rostovtzeff. To be published by Princeton University Press.
Power at Hand: Luxury and the Contestation of Political Identities in Hellenistic Asia and the Post-Achaemenid Iranian World
As Alexander the Great closed his eyes for the last time in Babylon in 323 BCE amid the wreckage of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, a vast new interconnected and multipolar world extending from the Balkans to the Gangetic Plain was beginning to come to life. This lecture series focuses on the role of luxury material in shaping and contesting elite identities in the lands of the former Persian Empire and its Central and Southern Asian borderlands and littorals. Over the last century, scholarship has made significant advances in the study of what has variously been approached as the ‘Hellenistic Far East,’ ‘Hellenistic Asia’ or ‘post-Achaemenid Iran,’ at first recovering its history and in recent decades developing a more nuanced set of interpretive approaches to its art, archaeology, and religions. Earlier studies of Hellenistic Asian luxury objects have largely focused on technical or formal questions, such as categorizing vessel shapes or searching for the origins or dating of ornamental or iconographic features. These lectures ask a new set of questions and seek to understand their roles as objects of political transculturation, creating and contesting elite bodily and practical states of being within a wider Afro-Eurasian context.
- April 23: A New Perso-Macedonian Material and Visual Culture of Power
- April 24: Tryphic Warfare and Scriptive Things
- April 29: Between Ecumenes
- May 1: Afro-Eurasian Entanglements and Transformations
