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CRASIS Annual Meeting and Masterclass 2025

Call for Papers Annual Meeting/Masterclass 2025

CRASIS invites applications for its fourteenth Annual Meeting and Masterclass, which will take place on 13 (Masterclass) and 14 (Annual Meeting) February 2025 at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The Annual Meeting and Masterclass is a two-day event,

designed to promote discussion and the exchange of ideas about the ancient Mediterranean world across traditional disciplinary boundaries among graduate students, postdocs, and established scholars. Each year, an internationally acknowledged expert in one of the fields represented by CRASIS is invited to teach a masterclass for MA and PhD students and 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 is dedicated to studying what has been called ‘the other 99%’: the worlds, realities, and lived experience of millions of non-elite individuals who populated the wider Mediterranean world in antiquity. In the interdisciplinary setting of CRASIS, we propose to reflect on the challenges that we face in understanding, narrating, and reconstructing their lives, lived experiences, and realities. Chief among these challenges are the (un)representativeness of different types of sources (textual sources both literary and epigraphical, material culture, archaeological data, …) and the marginalization or silencing of many inhabitants of the ancient world, in and after antiquity, along different and often intersecting axes (e.g. ethnicity, gender, class, poverty). How can research in, or across, different disciplines address these challenges?
We also invite participants to reflect on the scholarly biases and entrenched structures of our own disciplines, which have long worked from the implicit notion of a ‘leading’ (superior) aristocratic and a ‘following’ (inferior) popular culture, implicitly assuming that ‘the 99%’ passively received and emulated the cultural expressions of the ruling classes without themselves contributing significantly to cultural development or our collective human heritage. All of our disciplines are changing rapidly, and we invite speakers to engage with recent methodological innovations in different disciplines aimed at bringing the experience of hitherto less visible individuals and groups of the ancient Mediterranean world to the fore, ranging from critical fabulation to advances in bioarchaeology to concepts and tools which investigate the lived aspects of social and religious experiences. Finally, we ask how new insights into the lives of marginalised or invisible groups impact contemporary receptions of antiquity, and we discuss potential consequences for contemporary heritage management. We welcome contributions from all areas of Ancient Mediterranean research, including ancient history, archaeology, art history, classical literature, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, legal history and heritage studies.

Questions/topics to be discussed may include (but are not limited to) the following

  • Can we capture subaltern experiences and perspectives (e.g. experiences of poverty, work and dependency in the ancient world) and which methodological or conceptual innovations can help us do so? How can text-based disciplines and disciplines which focus on material culture and living environments better communicate and collaborate with each other in order to integrate different sets of evidence?
  • How do we address the (un)representativeness of different types of sources from antiquity? How can intersectional perspectives enrich our study of the ‘invisible’ millions of the ancient world?
  • In what ways did non-elite social groups and individuals claim and display agency? How can we study the agency of non-elite actors within societal frameworks of domination and suppression?
  • How can we use Lived Religion as a method of accessing a broader spectrum of social practices? How might we recover experiences of enslaved peoples in religious practice? In what ways can we access non-elite contributions to religious text production (e.g. recent studies of enslaved scribes or literate non-elites)? What role did the 99% play in effecting or characterizing religious changes and/or development?
  • What ideas about ‘the people’, the uneducated, crowds, or other non-elite collectives do ancient authors construct or challenge? Whom do ancient literary texts make invisible, and how? How can we read ancient texts ‘against the grain’?
  • How is the ancient world received in popular/non-elite culture today? How can such receptions offer inspiration and new perspectives for ancient world researchers?
  • What role do modern heritage institutions and museums play in perpetuating elite- centric narratives? Should they, for example, implement 'reparative canceling'; to better represent the ‘99%’? How can museums and heritage institutions navigate between preserving traditional elite-focused heritage and promoting more inclusive narratives about non-elite experiences?

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.

Deadline for Abstracts

PhD and Master students are invited to submit a proposal of a topic (500 words) for the Master Class (13 February 2023), explaining how their own research relates to the theme. All other researchers are invited to submit a title and abstract (250 words) for a lecture at the Annual Meeting (14 February 2023).

Proposals must be submitted no later than 9 December, 2024 via crasis.aws rug.nl, and should be accompanied by a short CV (one paragraph, max. 150 words). If necessary, CRASIS will contribute to travel and accommodation costs of graduate students, up to a limit of €200 for participants from outside the Netherlands, and up to €100 for participants from the Netherlands.

Information for PhD/ReMa Students

Those admitted to the Masterclass will be expected to submit a paper in advance of the meeting. Research Master students write a paper of 3,000–4,000 words, PhD candidates a paper of 5,000–6,000 words. These papers will be circulated among the keynote speaker and the participants should be submitted no later than 31 January, 2025. During the Masterclass, the participants will introduce their paper, followed by responses from a fellow student and Professor Peter Kruschwitz and general discussion.
For graduate students registered at a Dutch university, the Masterclass counts as an OIKOS, ARCHON or NOSTER activity and students will earn 3 ECTS by active participation.
For more information, please send an e-mail to crasis.aws rug.nl.

CRASIS

CRASIS is the interdisciplinary research institute for the study of the ancient world at the University of Groningen and the Protestant Theological University in Groningen. It brings together researchers from Classics, Theology and Religious Studies, Ancient History, Archaeology, Ancient Philosophy, and Legal History, focusing on Greek, Roman, Jewish and Near Eastern civilizations and their mutual interaction.

Previous meetings

Last modified:05 November 2024 12.37 p.m.
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