The conference “The Allure of the Ancient: Early Modern Receptions of the Ancient Near East,” will be held at Brown University, April 6-7, 2019. The conference will bring together a diverse range of scholars interested in the reception, use, and misuse of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia in early modern art, literature, scholarship, and politics. The conference seeks to go beyond a purely Eurocentric study of reception and will also explore local reception of the Ancient Near East and its reception in the Americas.
The Allure of the Ancient is free and open to the public and will take place at Brown University in RI Hall 108, 60 George St., Providence, RI 02912. We ask those planning to attend to register ahead of time:
https://events.brown.edu/
The conference is organized by John Steele, Margaret Geoga, and the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology. We also thank our co-sponsors: the Program in Early Cultures, the Program in Middle East Studies, the Department of Classics, the Department of History of Art and Architecture, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities.
Please contact Margaret Geoga ([email protected])
or John Steele ([email protected]) with any questions.
Conference program:
Saturday 4/6
9:00-9:10: Welcome
9:10-10:00: Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Between Babylon and Rome:
Fra Niccolo Guidalotto’s Panorama of Constantinople (1662)”
10:00-10:50: Andrea Middleton, “Collapsing Identities of
Ptolemaic Queens in Early Modern Rome”
10:50-11:20: break
11:20-12:10: Margaret Geoga, “Terrasson’s ‘Séthos’: An
Imagined Ancient Egypt and Its Afterlives”
12:10-1:00: Florian Ebeling, “The Wisdom of the Body and the
Egyptian Mysteries in 18th Century Freemasonry”
1:00-2:00: lunch break
2:00-2:50: Michael Seymour, “Images of Babylon in the Early
Modern Period”
2:50-3:40: Elisa Boeri, “Narrating the Ancient Near East:
French Architects and Draftsmen from the Revolution to the
‘Description of Egypt’”
3:40-4:10: break
4:10-5:00: Felipe Rojas, “American Euphrates: Invoking
Mesopotamia in the Colonial Americas”
Sunday 4/7
9:00-9:10: Welcome
9:10-10:00: Mark Darlow, “Egypto-mania in Enlightenment
Musical Theatre: From Gherardi to the Opéra national”
10:00-10:50: Julia Prest, “Voltaire’s ‘Sémiramis’: from
Paris to colonial Saint-Domingue”
10:50-11:20: break
11:20-12:10: John Steele, “The Portrayal of Egypt and Babylon
in Early Modern Histories of Science”
12:10-1:00: Daniel Stolzenberg, “What Was the Orient of Early
Modern Scholars? ‘Oriental Languages’ and the Roots of Academic
Orientalism”
1:00-2:00 lunch break
2:00-2:50: Maryam Sanjabi, “Zarathustra’s French Moment”
2:50-3:40: Lindsay Allen and Moya Carey, “Dialogues with
antiquity in pre-Islamic Iran”
3:40-4:10: break
4:10-5:00: Diane Greco Josefowicz, “Republics of Heaven:
Jean-François Champollion and the comparative study of
ancient religions”
5:00-5:10: Closing remarks