APA Blog
CFP: Gods, Objects, and Ritual Practice in Ancient Mediterranean Religion
An Interdisciplinary Conference Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Emory University, March 22-‐24th, 2013
Ritual implements, votive gifts, cult statues, magical gems, and the like, have frequently been the object of ancient textual reflection as well as modern archaeological and art historical investigation. But these items have not always been sufficiently investigated in their context, for what they can
tell us about ancient religious practice. This conference invites papers which engage with this
question in one of two ways:
- historically, how did the ancient people we study use objects to mediate between the human and the divine?
- methodologically, how are scholars to use these objects – either as represented in texts or recovered from sites – as means to investigating the cultural and historical realities of ancient religion?
The historical framework of the investigation is the ancient Mediterranean, open to periods from prehistoric through early Byzantine. Papers are invited from a broad range of disciplines, including ancient Jewish and Christian studies, Classics, art history, anthropology, philosophy, and history.
We especially encourage papers which contribute to the theoretical and methodological questions, and offer interdisciplinary or cross-‐cultural perspectives. All scholars, including recent PhDs and graduate students, are welcome to submit proposals.
Abstracts of 600 words for a paper to last between 15 to 20 minutes should be submitted by email attachment as .doc or .rtf files to socamr@gmail.com. Abstracts should contain a title and a word count, but no identifying information. All abstracts will be judged by our Program Committee. The deadline for submission of abstracts is November 30, 2012.
We are delighted that Annewies van den Hoek of the Harvard Divinity School will deliver the keynote address: "Divine Twins or Saintly Twins: The Dioscuri in an Early Christian Context."
For further information, contact Eric Orlin at eorlin@pugetsound.edu.
