Conference: ASCS 2024
The Annual Conference of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (ASCS) is always an exciting event for the ancient world studies crowd in Australia, New Zealand and the surrounding regions, and 2024 was no exception. With 120 papers delivered over 3 days, hosted by Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, we walk away tired, but inspired. Here are some of the highlights of emerging research from the conference.
Keynote: The Perception of Barbarians – Aimee Turner
The conference opened with a lecture by the eminent Professor dr Harmut Leppin from Goethe-Universität (Frankfurt), whose fascinating paper explored the development of barbarian identities in the Mediterranean world of the 5th century. Professor Leppin’s outline of the construction of identity and other through the inclusion and exclusion of values and the use of language offered potential insights into modern Australia’s national identity. Just like race became less of a factor in constructing barbaric others under the Roman Empire, as Leppin argues, race and religion tend not to be the grounds for including or excluding individuals from Australian identity. This trend continued in the transition Christianity and “barbarism” then became viewed as a choice for ignorance. In particular, I found the fact that Syrians were expected to learn Greek, but no Greeks learned Syriac, resonated, for me, with the way that the majority of Australians, immigrants themselves, expect those who join Australian society to learn English but make limited attempts to learn other languages themselves. An accent or poor English language is often used to discriminate against new citizens.
Best post-graduate presentation – Dr. Ryan W. Strickler
At each ASCS conference, an award is presented for the best post-graduate paper and presentation, recognising the emerging leaders of our field. The winner of the 2024 OPTIMA Prize was “Wool, Women, and War: Reconstructing the Textile Economy of the Roman Republic” by Fenella Palanca from the University of Melbourne. Ms. Palanca’s paper was an engaging reconsideration of this controversial topic which challenged the traditionally conservative approach to textile economy which treat the production of textiles was a vital aspect of the economy but one which was limited to the local community. Palanca’s innovation was applying a quantitative analysis to the question of textile production, including estimation of the labour necessary to produce clothing- from the shearing to spinning, including the use of contemporary experimentation with drop spindle spinning and warp-weighted looms typical of the period. By incorporating this approach with surviving literary evidence, Palanca convincingly demonstrated that women, including enslaved women, could produce a high output of textiles beyond personal use to supply the demands needed for the market, and especially the demands of the army. Palanca concluded the panel with a drop spindle demonstration after the question and answer period. Her unique approach and accessible delivery earned the unanimous vote of the prize committee.
Gender and Classics – Connie Skibinski
I really enjoyed every panel that I attended, and was impressed by the great diversity in topics throughout the conference. A personal highlight for me was the Gender and Classics panel on the first day, as it prompted me to think critically about how scholars can study gender identity and expression in antiquity as well as in reception texts. Noah Wellington’s paper on elite Athenian manhood in the 5th century BC provided a fascinating exploration of masculinity, treating ephebes as a liminal state of being that represent a transitory state towards adulthood. Noah addressed scholarship treating ephebes as “a temporary state of womanhood” but then provided his own more nuanced interpretation of ephebes as having distinct gendered expectations. Claire Ferguson’s paper on Ovidian reception in Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy provided insight into gender and sexuality as represented in antiquity and modernity. Claire drew our attention to key passages that challenge heteronormative paradigms, and shed light on the complexity of gendered expectations, romantic relationships and queerness in Ovid’s work and the contemporary reception.
On analysing Ovid – Shona Edwards
Ben Nagy’s paper, titled ‘A stylometric reassessment of the (pseudo?) Ovidian Nux‘, was a joy for our little cohort of Ovidian scholars at the conference. As we well know, Ovid has suffered with waxing and waning popularity through the ages, and nothing can be more devastating to any particular work than the firm condemnation of disputed authorship. It’s not Ovid? Then it isn’t worth our time. Ben gave an excellent overview of the major actors in the scholarship on the Pseudo-Ovidian Nux (or De nuce, ‘On the Walnut Tree’), and the ways their assessment of its place within the Ovidian canon are perhaps based more on personal attitudes. Scholars are quick to judge what is ‘too good’, or hesitant to make any claim due to the lack of conclusive evidence. The current consensus? This isn’t Ovid.
Ben took on this apparently closed case with enthusiasm and a straightforward attitude. Ben introduced us to the field of stylometric analysis, walking us through a series of tables which describe the metrical similarities between the Nux, other Augustan elegies, and Ovid’s other works. The basic premise is this: Every author has some style that is indigenous, and leaves traces in every work – it is measurable, and can be traced over time as metrical style develops. This was a remarkable analysis, not least of all because Ben kept those of us who chose Arts and Classics in order to avoid the numbers and tables of STEM creatively engaged.
What Ben produced was a beautiful constellation of works across authors, space and time. Ben, as our tour guide through this Latin galaxy, waved us past the belt of Ovid’s early elegiac works, including the Ars and the single Heroides, past the nearby nebula of works by Tibullus and Propertius, and over to the ‘depression cloud’ of Ovid’s exile work. Here, the Nux orbits. What Ben well demonstrated is that while Ovid is popularly understood as a ‘sad old man writing in the snow’, and while his exile works show a turn towards epistolarity, the Nux sits along with the Ibis and the double Heroides as evidence of an ongoing commitment to experimenting in more diverse genres. In another example, Ben showed how style development over time indicates revision. Therefore, the stylometric character of the Amores sits centrally in the constellation, or as Ben said, ‘goes everywhere’, due to being heavily revised. What is especially valuable, too, is that stylometry can detect imitation. There is nothing more exciting than when, as Gemma Neall said, ‘new Ovid just dropped’. This work has important implications for the way those of us who work on Ovid position his works in relation to each other. There are manuscript issues and authorship debates in many works which Ben’s work can only further clarify. We excitedly await Ben’s forthcoming article.
The underappreciated fields – Ewan Coopey
ASCS is renowned for its perceptive papers on the Roman Republic and Classical Literature. However, there are also typically a host of other areas of study on display; the quality of which are testament to the (sometimes underappreciated, including by myself in the past) conference’s wide scope. Most closely related to my own research, were the two archaeology sessions; in which a wide array of approaches and themes were on display. Rory McLennan of UQ fused archaeometry and epigraphy together to explore the changing water infrastructure at the quaint site of Signia in Italy, as well as the potential exchange networks it was operating within. Dan Osland of the University of Otago provided a succinct yet critical introduction to 5th c. CE Hispania, in which the idea of a unified ‘Suevic Kingdom’ being visible in the material record was brought into question (some more ‘left field’ burial choices incited some fun discussion afterwards as well). Jeremy Armstrong of Auckland University transported us away to the realms of experimental archaeology and ancient armour, highlighting some findings from his collaborative work with blacksmiths in New Zealand (it turns out, what you wore under and around your bronze/iron armour may have been just as important as the armour itself). Finally, throwing yet another methodological approach into the ring, Samuli Semelius of the University of Helsinki wrangled together network analysis and the Gini coefficient of inequality to map access to water in Pompeii. While demonstrating that, in regard to water access, Pompeii did not seem too unequal, Samuli astutely observed that water access is but one facet of health inequality. (I hear there was also a paper applying a multiscalar assemblage approach to the epigraphic habit in Dalmatia, but I will leave a review of that to someone else…) Whilst I could move on to other non-Republican/Literature highlights from ASCS, such as Prof. Hartmut Leppin‘s illuminating keynote on Late Antique Syriac vs Classical perceptions of ‘The Barbarian’, or the classical reception session that had papers on Kendrick Lamar and Lizzo, I think these archaeology sessions attest to the exciting and wide ranging work being done by scholars in Australasia and its wider scholarly networks. From digital archaeology and inequality, to experimenting with modern armourers, ASCS was serving it up.
Digital artefacts and collecting practices – Gemma Neall
In the final session of ASCS45 I found myself watching two talks which have stuck with me in the week since, encouraging the audience to both look forward and reflect back on museum practices and our relationships with material artefacts. Alina Kozlovski’s talk on the use of digital artefacts and their connection to material culture provided a fascinating perspective on how we use technological advancements in our study of the ancient world. I was struck by how Kozlovski noted that our interaction with technology has been carefully choreographed, and how we might seek to utilise this choreography in how digital artefacts are interacted with. We all ‘pinch to zoom’ without even thinking, yet she reminded us how recent the action itself is with a clip of Steve Job’s 2007 keynote, where the audience audibly gasped at such an action this is so commonplace for us today. I can’t help but wonder which technological marvels, particularly in the realm of museum studies, we will see become commonplace in another ten to fifteen years.
Following on from this was Candace Richard’s examination into the collecting practices of the Nicholson Museum of the University of Sydney. Richards provided a thorough and interesting analysis of the Nicholson’s collection over the course of the 20th century, from casts of classical figures to an impressive array of sherds used to teach archaeology students at the university. She also reflected on that which the university had traded away in order to boost their collection, displaying letters between past Nicholson curators and those from other institutions. I left Candace’s talk reminded that museums are not ahistorical, and the collection practices of individual curators can shape and form approaches as the museums become material culture in their own right.