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Research Centre for Religious Studies Research Centres CRASIS Research and Teaching

CRASIS Annual Meeting and Masterclass 2025

Registration Open for Annual Meeting/Masterclass 2025

Registration is now possible for the CRASIS Annual Meeting 2025 on Approaching the Ancient World from Below.The Annual Meeting takes place on Friday 14 February at the University of Groningen. The event is designed to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas about the ancient world across traditional disciplinary boundaries. All are very welcome!

Each year, an internationally acknowledged expert in one of the fields represented by CRASIS is invited to deliver the CRASIS Keynote Lecture at the Annual Meeting.

This year we are honoured to welcome Prof. Peter Kruschwitz (University of Vienna), who will teach the masterclass and deliver the keynote at the Annual Meeting. The theme of the 2025 Masterclass and Annual Meeting will be:

Approaching the Ancient World from Below

This year’s CRASIS Masterclass and Annual Meeting focuses on ‘the other 99%’—the lives and experiences of non-elite individuals in the ancient Mediterranean world. We aim to address the challenges of reconstructing their histories, particularly the issues surrounding the (un)representativeness of sources such as literary texts, epigraphy, material culture, and archaeology, as well as the marginalization or silencing of these groups along various axes like ethnicity, gender, and class. We invite participants to consider how interdisciplinary approaches can tackle these challenges, with a focus on recent methodological innovations, such as critical fabulation and advances in bioarchaeology. Additionally, we seek to reflect on the scholarly biases in our disciplines, which have often overlooked the active contributions of the ‘99%’ to cultural development. Finally, we’ll explore how new insights into these marginalized groups impact contemporary understandings of antiquity and heritage management. How can interdisciplinary research across fields like history, archaeology, literature, and bioarchaeology help overcome the challenges of representing non-elite groups and their experiences in the ancient world?Contributions are welcome from all areas of Ancient Mediterranean research, including history, archaeology, art history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, legal history, and heritage studies.

Programme

  • 09:30-10:00 Coffee, tea, and registration
  • 10:00-10:10 Opening remarks and welcome

Session 1 Moderator: Prof. dr. Bettina Reitz-Joosse
  • 10:10-11:10 Keynote lecture by Prof. dr. Peter Kruschwitz (University of Vienna): "Rebuilding Ancient Cultural History: A Bottom-Up Approach"
  • 11:10-11:40 Coffee and tea break

Session 2 Moderator: Dr. Rebecca Van Hove
  • 11:40-12:15 Dr. Anna Moles (University of Groningen): "A Bioarchaeological Approach to Inequality in Ancient Greece"
  • 12:15-12:50 Dr. Miriam Groen-Vallinga (Radboud University Nijmegen): "A Slave with Her Master’s Child: A Revised Osteobiography for Two Victims from Herculaneum"
  • 12:50-14:10 Lunch

Session 3 Moderator: Dr. Kimberly Fowler
  • 14:10-14:45 Dr. Miko Flohr (Leiden University): "Antiquity from the Ground Up? Architecture and Lived Inequality in Roman Italy"
  • 14:45-15:20 Dr. Emilia Mataix Ferrándiz (International University of Catalonia): "Ticius Lawless? Commercial Epigraphy and the Dynamics of Roman Trade"
  • 15:20-15:40 Coffee and tea break

Session 4 Moderator: Dr. Felix Budelmann
  • 15:40-16:15 Dr. Davide Massimo (University of Nottingham): "Working Class Hero? Leonidas of Tarentum’s Poetry of the Common Folk"
  • 16:15-16:50 Dr. Jacqueline Klooster (University of Groningen): "As It Has Never Been Told Before…? Aspects of Current Mythological Retellings from a Female Perspective"
  • 16:50-17:25 Dr. Eelco Glas (University of Groningen, Aarhus University): "Vivid Representation and Victims of Forced Displacement in Jewish Literature in Greek (2nd Century BCE-1st Century CE)"

Closing and Reception

  • 17:25-17:35 Closing remarks by chair
  • 17:35-18:25 Drinks and reception (open to all)
  • 18:30 Dinner (for registered participants)

Registration

The Annual Meeting will take place in the Court Room of the Faculty of Religion, Culture, and Society (Oude Boteringestraat 38). You can register for the Annual Meeting via this form.

The deadline for registration is Friday 7th February.

CRASIS

CRASIS is a platform for the study of antiquity and brings together experts in the Graeco-Roman world and Near Eastern studies —Classical Greece, the Hellenistic world, the Roman Empire, Judaism, Christianity and Islam — at the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society of the University of Groningen and the Protestant Theological University. Its aim is to advance interdisciplinary study of the interplay between culture, religion and society in antiquity.

About the keynote speaker

Peter Kruschwitz is Professor of Ancient Cultural History at the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna. His research focuses on poetic culture and song culture, the history of mentality, and non-elite cultural practice in the Roman Empire. He is both a distinguished scholar of Latin literature and an eminent epigraphist, and his pioneering research on ancient verse inscriptions crosses the traditional disciplinary divide between these two specialisms, offering new ways of understanding poetry as much more than an elite form of cultural expression. Based on the substantial amount of (often neglected) verse inscriptions that survive from Roman times, his ERC Advanced project “Mapping out the poetic landscape(s) of the Roman Empire: ethnic and regional variations, socio-cultural diversity, and crosscultural transformations” has significantly expanded our understanding and appreciation of Roman poetry as an expression of an ethnically, socially, and linguistically diverse cultural practice.

Information for PhD/ReMa Students

To participate in the Masterclass, Master students are expected to submit a paper of 3,000–4,000 words. PhD students submit a paper of 5,000–6,000 words. These papers will be circulated among the participants and are therefore to be submitted no later than January 27th, 2025. During the Masterclass, the participants will introduce their paper, followed by responses from a fellow student and Professor Peter Kruschwitz.

For students at Dutch universities, the Masterclass counts as an OIKOS, ARCHON or NOSTER activity and students will earn three course credits (EC) by active participation.

For more information, please send an e-mail to crasis.aws rug.nl or see the website.

Register now!

Previous meetings

Last modified:30 January 2025 1.07 p.m.
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