Activities

Ancient Societies Workshop and Core Seminar

This interdisciplinary workshop serves as a meeting ground for those who work on the ancient world at Yale, and is an important forum that allows sustained conversation about a common theme. The workshop meets once a month during the academic year, and is supplemented by the core graduate seminar in the Archaia program. Presenters include Yale faculty and graduate students, as well as occasional visiting professors. The chronological scope of the seminar extends over the first millennium BCE and up through the premodern period; issues of reception are also considered.

This year Archaia is thrilled to present an exciting lineup of talks and events. For the Fall 2025 semester, our four speakers discuss new directions and new research in global antiquity– both methodologically (how can we study global antiquity? How do we find through-lines across different communities over time and space?) and with regard to new, regionally specific research from across the ancient world. This Fall 2025 Ancient Societies Workshop is titled:

“New Directions, New Research”

This is not tied to any one Archaia core seminar, but speaks directly to the program’s interdisciplinary goals, core mission, outreach, and graduate student training.

For the Spring 2026 semester, our four talks are linked to and outgrowths of Archaia’s exciting core seminar:

“Environmental Determinism and the Making of Human Difference in the Premodern World”

This will be taught by Professors Malina Buturovic (Classics) and Giulia Accornero (Music). Course description provided below.

Environmental Determinism and the Making of Human Difference in the Premodern World

Can an environment shape the habits and behaviors of its dwellers? And if so, could one map human difference across different latitudes, climates, and winds? In this class, we will explore how ‘scientific’ and vernacular theories of environmental influence shaped the construction of human difference in the pre-modern world. We approach this question through both historical and historiographical lenses, following the red thread of environmental determinism—the ideology that the environment determines physical attributes and mental characteristics of human and non-human animals—across discourses such as medicine, music theory, natural philosophy, geography, ethnography, cartography, astronomy, and physiognomy.

This course will engage with primary sources as well as recent questions and methodologies from the environmental and medical humanities, media studies, and critical race theory. Through a series of case studies, the course offers conceptual and methodological tools for investigating issues of environmental determinism both inside and outside of the premodern world. We will examine ways in which notions of humanity and the human body could be constructed in relation to their environment; assess the role of formalized sciences in supporting practices of racecraft; and investigate how notions of environmental determinism and human difference traveled across cultures.

We will also visit Yale’s own archives to examine the long afterlives of premodern concepts and methods surveyed in the opening weeks of the course, consider how modern discourses of human difference emerge from pre-modern precursors, and ask how these tropes still inflect contemporary questions and anxieties regarding climatic and environmental change.

Organizers Malina Buturovic and Giulia Accornero

List of Ancient Societies Workshop themes from previous years

Previous Conferences

“Dura Europos: Past, Present, Future”

Please visit this page for the conference proceedings

“In the crucible of Empire: resistance, revolts and revolutions in the Greco-Roman world”, October 30–31, 2014.

Please visit this page for the conference proceedings

Workshops

The Archaia Forum is an interdisciplinary working group for graduate students who work on the ancient and premodern world (broadly conceivd). We welcome students of any historical period in any geographical region to join us in discussion of what it means to study the past. We will meet once a month for events of various types, including roundtable discussions, professional development, and student presentations. The Forum is intended as a venue for those involved in the the Archaia Qualification to workshop their capstone projects. Our overarching goal is to provide an open and collegial space to build community, receive feedback on research, and engage deeply with interdisciplinary themes and methodologies. We will issue a call for presentation proposals at the beginning of each semester, but we also welcome proposals and suggestions for other events on an ongoing basis. Any questions and concerns should be directed towards the coordinators, Mary Curwen (mary.curwen@yale.edu) and Beth Wang (beth.wang@yale.edu).

Women in Ancient Studies Forum (WASF) Women in Ancient Studies Forum at Yale University is a forum for scholars in ancient and premodern studies that builds an academic community across disciplinary boundaries. No matter which region or premodern period you study, which department you are affiliated with, or which methodologies you use, we hope you will check out some of our events. Our monthly meetings range from panel discussions and receptions to smaller lunches with faculty members. The one common theme is bringing people from different disciplines and career stages together and discussing questions pertaining to women, academia, and professional development. We’re interested in identifying and naming systemic problems, but also in creating spaces to address these problems. Several of our events are also designed especially for women in ancient and premodern studies to build professional relationships at every stage of their careers.

Cultures of the Classical ‘Cultures of the Classical’ was a network running from 2011-2017 that drew together scholars at Yale who work on receptions of Greco–Roman Classical Antiquity, and the Classical Tradition (including comparative Classical Traditions and rival antiquities). We are particularly interested in complex plays with the past in which texts and works of art, and indeed whole cultural movements, have appropriated aspects of Classical Antiquity while simultaneously asserting their distance from ancient Greece and Rome. The scholars involve remain at the cutting edge of this kind of research.

Greco-Roman Lunch is sponsored by the Classics Department and is held bi-weekly, on the first and third (and sometimes fifth) Mondays of the month in the Fellows’ Room at Saybrook College. The invitation list consists of faculty and graduate students from the Departments of Classics, History, Art History, EALL, Judaic Studies, Religious Studies, and others, and they convene at 12:00 for lunch followed by a presentation by one of their number at 12:30. A presentation of up to 30 minutes is followed by questions. The focus of papers ranges freely from literary to archaeological to cultural. Lunch is provided free to those who are not on a meal plan. For more information please contact the organizers: Alex Mayo (GSAS Classics) and Lily Conable (Div School)

Medieval Lunch Colloquium The weekly Medieval Lunch Colloquium brings together medievalists from a variety of departments in the University for informal presentations and discussion. At each meeting, a speaker presents work-in-progress to an interdisciplinary audience of graduate students, faculty and staff working in medieval studies. Speakers include both Yale faculty and graduate students, with occasional out-of-town guests.

The Hebrew Bible Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Yale Divinity School and the Program in Judaic Studies. Every year it brings to campus some of the most significant scholars in the field of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism, both junior and senior, to share their recent research. These lectures make available to the Yale community the breadth of scholarship currently being produced on ancient Israelite and Jewish history, literature, beliefs, and practices.

Yale Lectures in Medieval Studies The Medieval Studies Program organizes Yale Lectures in Medieval Studies, an interdisciplinary lecture series which brings to Yale America’s most creative scholars of the Middle Ages, presenting innovative and exciting work in fields such as paleography, codicology, liturgical studies, music, history of art, archaeology, history, literature, and philosophy. The series, which is run by students in medieval disciplines, emphasizes intellectual diversity and rigorous scholarship and is a vital part of Yale’s interdisciplinary approach to the medieval period.

The Annual Rostovtzeff Lecture and Colloquium

The lecture honors the legacy of Michael I. Rostovtzeff, a titan of Ancient History and one of the greats of twentieth-century historical scholarship. Rostovtzeff taught at Yale from 1925 until his retirement in 1944. He was a world authority on Hellenistic and Roman history and wrote widely on ancient history, particularly in the field of economic history. The annual lecture brings scholars to Yale who work in areas pioneered by Rostovtzeff, but whose field-changing research takes Ancient History in new directions.
Visit Rostovzeff page at the Yale Classics website

Archaia Study Tour

Archaia’s “Early China” Study Tour: May 2025

By Malina Buturovic and Jessica Lamont

In May 2025, we had the supreme privilege of attending Archaia’s “Early China” Study Tour as two of 14 total participants, representing some seven different departments and programs at Yale: EALL, Anthropology, History, Classics, NELC, Religious Studies, and Yale’s Divinity School. This incredible, life-changing tour was envisioned and organized by Archaia’s former PostDoctoral Fellow, Dr. Kirie Stromberg (now at Pomona College). Zhao Ling also worked together with Dr. Stromberg as our amazing China-based tour guide.

This Archaia trip was a whirlwind visit to important sites associated with “early China” - from the Pre-Yangshao period (6500–5000 BCE) to the fall of the Eastern Han (220 CE). Participants (Ph.D. students, MA students, Yale PostDoc and two faculty) took it in turn to give presentations on sites and questions connected with Early China; for many participants, this involved reading and researching well outside their “home” department, learning about early Chinese history, literature, and archaeology—an Archaia goal realized! Our group discussions laid great emphasis on both the history of “early China” and the historiographical and institutional contexts of its study within the Chinese academy. At virtually every stage, we had discussions with faculty at CASS (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) and local universities.

Our first stop was Beijing, where we visited the Chinese Archeological Museum for a sweeping overview of Chinese history and archeology. During free time, we toured the Great Wall, Summer Palace, and Tiantan Park in smaller groups (benefiting from the expert and patient guidance of Maria Ma, Classics, who grew up in Beijing).

We then sped to Xi’an via bullet train, where we spent an unforgettable morning at Taiping, an active neolithic archaeological site, toured the Shaanxi Museum, Qin Han Museum, and Banpo Museum and, in one packed day, visited the mausoleums of the Qin and Han emperors. Some of us managed on a lovely evening, as the sun set, to (briskly!) walk Xi’an’s old city wall circuit—not enough exercise, however, to offset the many pounds of delicious noodles we’d consumed earlier that day.

Our final stop on the tour was Chengdu, where we encountered the extraordinary excavations at Sangxindui—featuring 3,000-year-old bronzes, many excavated, restored, and displayed within the last five years in a brand-new museum. A one-day hiatus from touring museums and archeological sites brought several of us to Mt. Qingcheng, a Taoist mountain just outside the city. Our final day was spent at Jinsha and the Chengdu Historical Museum. Oh, and two little rhyming words for you, Chengdu: HOT. POT.

Over the course of the trip, sitting on buses and trains and eating together daily, our group read and talked avidly—comparing approaches, problems, and questions from our work, which ranged Bronze Age China, medieval Central Asia, and the ancient Mediterranean. Among other things, the trip was a reminder that the real work of studying “global antiquities” is not the production of new master narratives but rather the multiplication of entanglements—between histories, cultures, periods, departments, national traditions, institutions, disciplines, and scholarly communities. We are all grateful to Archaia and to Yale for supporting this important interdisciplinary work, to Kirie Stromberg for the vision, erudition, and care that underwrote the planning of this tour, and to all participants for ten days of exuberant discussion, thinking, learning, eating, Luckin Coffee drinking, and living together.