Institute of Classical Studies

Sign up now for the final Digital Classics Seminar of the 2025-26 year. Jesse Obert (University of South Florida) will dicsus:

Warriors without War on Archaic Crete: Testing Paradigms with Big Data and Social Network Analysis
Friday 31 July, 5pm

Warriors without War on Archaic Crete: Testing Paradigms with Big Data and Social Network Analysis In the 1930s, G. T. Griffith described the Greek island of Crete as “a ready-made nursery for mercenaries” because Cretans were poor and violent in his own day. The island was still being integrated into the Greek State after centuries of resistance and guerilla warfare against the Ottoman Empir...

Final days to apply ✍️

Join the ICS! We are recruiting a Project Conservator to work on the Ventris Papers: an archive of correspondence, papers, drawings, photographs,as well as selected offprints and newspaper cuttings relating to the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris.

Full details here:

Project Conservator:Warburg Institute The University of London is both the UK’s largest provider of international distance and online learning and the convenor of a federation of 17 renowned higher education institutions. The University is also home to the School of Advanced Study, which has a national role in championing research, te...

In a new blog post, Dr Daniel Sutton writes about using Herodotus’ Constitutional Debate to explore democracy and governance in schools:

Re-Enacting Herodotus’ Constitutional Debate Dr Daniel Sutton writes about using Herodotus’ Constitutional Debate to explore democracy and governance in schools which was supported by an ICS Public Engagement Grant.

Call for Papers: PGWiP Seminar Series 2026-2027: Bridging the gap between Archaeology and the Classics

We invite abstracts from postgraduate students at UK universities and beyond to present their research at the 2026/7 Postgraduate Work in Progress (PGWiP) seminar series. The series is designed as an informal, friendly environment for doctoral and other postgraduate students to present research at any stage of development and to receive feedback from other postgraduate researchers.

Deadline for submissions: 31 August

PGWiP Seminars: Call for Papers Call for Papers: PGWiP Seminar Series 2026-2027: Bridging the gap between Archaeology and the Classics

Join Burak Boşdurmaz (University of Koç) for the upcoming Digital Classics Seminar: Mapping the Blue Horizon: A Digital Corpus Approach to the ‘Caeruleus-Glaucus’ Complex in Classical Latin Literature

Fri 17 Jul, 5pm

Mapping the Blue Horizon: A Digital Corpus Approach to the ‘Caeruleus-Glaucus’ Complex in Classical Latin Literature Traditional philological approaches to ancient color semantics have long struggled with the “fluidity” of terms like caeruleus, often reducing them to a single or a few corresponding terms in the target language. This paper presents a digital intervention into this state of research. By employin...

The ICS is delighted to announce that the 2026 George Grote Prize in Ancient History (ECR) is awarded to Dr George Oliver for his study on ‘The Independence of the “Martyrdom” of the Acts of Thomas’.

Congratulations George!
https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/news/2026-george-grote-prize-ancient-history-ecr

Digital Encoding of Epigraphic Surrogates, workshop 2
Wednesday 15th July, 2026, 14:00-15:30 BST (online)

Following on from a preliminary discussion on epigraphic manuscripts and surrogates in February 2026 (report) (sample manuscripts), this workshop will consider the question of what features of digital epigraphic manuscript or notebook page may be recorded, represented or annotated. A few examples of publication and annotation interfaces will be presented, and some sample manuscript pages used to spark discussion. Examples and contributions from all participants are welcome.

Digital Encoding of Epigraphic Surrogates, workshop 2 Convened by: Tatiana Tommasi (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari), Sarah Williams (University of London), Caroline Barron (Durham University), Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Raphaële Mouren (British School at Rome)

Register now for the upcoming Digital Classicist Wiki Linked Open Data editing session
Date: Monday 13th July 2026, 16:00–17:00 BST
Organisers: Sarah Middle (University of York), Tom Gheldof (KU Leuven)

Full details here:

Digital Classicist Wiki Linked Open Data editing session This online event brings together editors of the Digital Classicist Wiki with colleagues who work in the area of Linked Open Data. The DC Wiki (wiki.digitalclassicist.org) is a collaboratively maintained collection of records about digital projects, tools, approaches and other resources for ancient....

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Conference: Visualising the Eastern Mediterranean Landscape (University of St Andrews, Scotland, 10-11 June 2027)

During the long nineteenth century, the landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean were in transition. Inside and outside the shifting territories of the Ottoman Empire, urban areas and infrastructure expanded, networks of transport and travel grew, rural hinterlands were linked to global economies, and minerals and antiquities alike were extracted at a quickening pace. At the same time as these unevenly distributed changes, narratives of ‘timeless’ classical, Biblical or Oriental picturesque landscapes for tourist consumption persisted, often in contrast to local modes of landscape value or environmental knowledge. Foreign attempts to aesthetise landscapes were accompanied by criticisms of agroecological spaces as unproductive, ‘degraded’ or ‘waste’. The resulting contradictory understandings of environmental change, continuity, and value created a dynamic of ‘landscape dissonance’, to adapt a term coined by Anna Stroulia and Susan Sutton (2009), between insiders and outsiders to the eastern Mediterranean. Many such nineteenth-century discourses continue to shape environmental imaginaries of the region to this day.

Art and visual culture have always had a particularly powerful part to play in perceptions of land and environment. Yet for all the blossoming interest in the environmental history of the eastern Mediterranean, images have not been a central concern. To this end, this conference invites contributions which explore how visual sources have shaped understandings of the physical spaces of the eastern Mediterranean. How did environmental change manifest (or fail to manifest) in visual representations by artists with varying senses of belonging or place attachment? As well as sources which fall in the western genre of landscape imagery, we welcome contributions which discuss local vernacular image-making traditions, or which complicate easy distinctions between the two. We invite papers focusing on the period 1750-1920 and exploring topics including but not limited to:

• Representations of urban and rural space
• Relations of agricultural production, consumption and ‘improvement’
• Infrastructural/industrial impacts on landscape (e.g. railways, urbanisation)
• Intersections of extractive practices (e.g. mining, archaeology)
• State/private/common land ownership
• Territories contested by local/national/imperial actors
• Land, travel, tourism, and mobility
• Eastern Mediterranean climates, environmental Orientalism
• Landscapes as sites for mythology, stories, and memory
• (Dis)continuities between ancient/pre-modern and modern land use
• Geomorphological features such as rivers, coasts, deserts, mountains
• Images which conform or subvert pastoral/picturesque/sublime tropes

The conference will take place in person on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 June 2027 at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. We are pleased to share that Dr Onur İnal and Professor Elisabeth Fraser will provide keynote addresses on successive days. Limited funding is available to support travel to the conference for those without institutional support to do so, particularly for those based in the eastern Mediterranean.

Proposals for 20-minute papers (including a title and an abstract of 200–300 words, and a short bio) should be submitted by 01 September 2026 to Dr Alexandra Solovyev ([email protected]) and Dr Sebastian Marshall ([email protected]). Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 01 October 2026.

Bibliography:

Fraser, E. A. (2017). Mediterranean Encounters: Artists between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839. Pennsylvania State University Press.

İnal, O. (2025). Gateway to the Mediterranean: An Environmental History of Late Ottoman Izmir. Cambridge University Press.

Stroulia, A., & Sutton, S. B. (2009). Archaeological Sites and Local Places: Connecting the Dots. Public Archaeology, 8(2–3), 124–140.

Food and Feasting in Antiquity: ClassicsFest 2026

ClassicsFest 2026 brought Newcastle to life with three days of theatre, talks, tastings, performance and conversation inspired by the ancient world. Cinzia Hardy writes about the celebration of theatre, food, ideas and the ancient world. Across the city, audiences of all ages explored Food & Feasting in Antiquity - discovering how ancient food culture connects to contemporary questions of identity, hospitality and community. Read the blog post here: https://ics.sas.ac.uk/news-events/blogs/food-feasting-antiquity-classicsfest-2026