THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL SOMETIME IN THE SPRING. Michelle Damian, Assistant Professor of History, Monmouth College (mdamian@monmouthcollege.edu) Maritime trade and transport flourished during Japan’s early modern (Edo, 1603 – 1868) period, connecting the urban centers of Osaka and Edo with the farthest reaches of Hokkaido and Kyushu. The omnipresent nature and variety of […]

Sienkewicz Lecture on Roman Archaeology Jodi Magness, Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (magness@email.unc.edu) In the first century B.C.E., Herod the Great, who ruled Judea as client king on behalf of Rome, built a fortified palace atop the mountain of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. […]

In the past few decades the Roman fort at Vindolanda has had some of the most extraordinary finds from the northern frontier of the Roman Empire that have truly changed […]

In ancient Athens, as today, people got sick. Suffering from anything from epidemic disease and accidents to chronic illness and passing indisposition, they required treatment. Much of what we know about that treatment comes from texts, particularly the body of medical lore known as the Hippocratic Corpus, which began to be written down in the […]

Susan Rotroff, Jarvis Thurston & Mona Van Duyn Professor Emerita, Washington University, St. Louis (srotroff@wustl.edu) A large, irregular boulder fenced off by a parapet of stone slabs lies at a crossroads on the north side of the Agora (the public square) of ancient Athens. When excavated, in the 1970s, I, t was covered with hundreds […]