Blog Post #87: The Perils of Love: Love Spells in Coptic Magic with Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin

In this instalment of our Halloween Feature on Curses, Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin highlights her research on magic as lived religion. In particular, she addresses the ways in which Christians perpetuated magical practices that had existed in Egypt for millennia, but were adapted to make them their own.

Blog Post #86: “In Blood and Ashes”: An Interview with Jessica Lamont

In our latest instalment of our Halloween series on “Cursing in the Ancient World” we are interviewing Dr. Jessica Lamont, Assistant Professor at Yale University, on her newly published book through Oxford “In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece.” Dr. Lamont shares with us the questions and research that inspire this work, providing remarkable insight into the real people behind the curses in the ancient Mediterranean.

Blog Post #85: Graduate Student Feature with Charlotte Spence

We’re back for another month of Halloween-related content here at Peopling the Past. This month we are feature blogs that deal with cursing in the Ancient World. Our first post in this series features the work of Charlotte Spence, a PhD Candidate at the University of Exeter, who’s work explore the ways in which ancient individuals conceived of the role of the dead and the gods in carrying out curses.

Blog Post #84: Graduate Student Feature with Anisa Mara

In this week’s blog post, we interview Anisa Mara, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Anisa takes us through her work studying Bronze Age pottery from legacy collections of excavations in Albania to understand community organization, mobility, and social diversification during a period of significant change in this region.

Blog Post #83: Graduate Student Feature with Dora Gao

In this week’s blog post, we interview Dora Gao, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History (IPAH) at the University of Michigan, who takes us through their research on religious kinship, affect, and belonging in Ptolemaic Egypt with a particular focus on marginalized populations.

Blog Post #80: Graduate Student Feature with Matt Coleman

In this week’s blog post, we interview Matt Coleman, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto, who takes us through his research on the “popular” reception of Hellenistic art in antiquity and the modern world.

Podcast Season 3, Episode 10 – These Boots are Made for Walking: Women’s Mobility and Migration in the Roman Empire with Marie-Adeline Le Guennec

On this episode of the Peopling the Past Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Marie-Adeline Le Guennec, a professor in the hisory department at Université du Québec à Montréal, where she works on the history of Roman mobility and migration. Since 2015 she has been the co-director of Projet Hospitam, which examines hospitality in the civilizations of the Mediterranean basin. She is the author of Aubergistes et clients : l’accueil mercantile dans l’Occident romain (IIIe siècle av. J.-C. – IVe siècle apr. J.-C.) (Ecole française de Rome, 2019) and co-editor of Hospitalité et régulation de l’altérité dans l’Antiquité méditerranéenne (Ausonius, 2022).

Listen in, as Dr. Le Guennec talks about the ways in which women moved around the Roman Empire and the sources that document this movement, as well as how modern scholars examine issues of movement and mobility in the Roman world.

Podcast Season 3, Episode 9 – (Not so) Risky Business: the Potential Perils of Childbirth in Ancient Rome with Anna Bonnell Freidin

On this episode of the Peopling the Past Podcast, we are joined by Dr. Ana Bonnell Freidin, an assistant professor of history at the University of Michigan. Listen in, as Dr. Bonnell Freidin talks about risk, pregnancy, and childbirth in the ancient Roman empire, and the ways in which we might engage with notions of community care in the ancient Roman world. Content warning: this episode discusses infant and maternal death.

Blog Post #77: Interview with Gino Canlas of the Database of Religious History

In this week’s blog post, we interview Dr. Gino Canlas, a postdoctoral researcher with the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia. This project is an open access resource that offers a large-scale study of historical evidence and trends in religious experience from the Neolithic period to the present day. Dr. Canlas will be sharing his work on this project at our upcoming colloquium, “Presenting the Past: Responsible Engagement and Mediterranean History”.