Local Identities in the Ancient Mediterranean

November 7–8, 2008

a conference in memory of Corinne Crawford

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Corinne Crawford, in memoriam
Schedule
Keynote speakers
Abstracts
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Classics Department

370 Dwinelle Hall
University of California, Berkeley

This conference seeks to reexplore and reexamine the burgeoning study of identity in antiquity, a topic which remains under-theorized despite the great quantity of scholarship which has emerged from other disciplines on the subject. In particular, scholars of antiquity often describe local identities in antagonistic terms, assuming either acculturation or resistance with respect to larger dominant culture. The possibilities for integrating different bodies of evidence (historical, literary, epigraphic artistic, etc.) into the study of identity have also not been fully explored. We aim to bring scholars into conversation both with other sub-fields and with theoretical approaches from beyond Classics in order to generate new approaches to local identities in the ancient Mediterranean and the study of identity as a conceptual category. This conference seeks to promote an approach in which local groups and individuals in the ancient Mediterranean negotiate identities which flourish (rather than persist) not in spite of but because of their interactions with broader cultural or political entities.

The conference itself will feature two faculty addresses, one by Nino Luraghi, author of The ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory (2008) and Professor of the Classics at Princeton University, and the other by Nicola Terrenato, editor of Articulating Local Cultures: Power and Identity under the Expanding Roman Republic (2007) and Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan. In addition there will be seven graduate student speakers organized methodologically into three panels. More details can be found on our schedule page.

This conference was designed in large part to honor the research interests of Corinne Crawford, a Graduate student in the Classics department, who was killed in the summer of 2007 in a motor vehicle accident. Corinne's work focused on the local communities of Italy in the time of Roman expansion, and drew from linguistics, literature, history, art, epigraphy, and archaeology to offer evidence that these identities flourished rather than floundered because of their contact with and participation in Roman culture. With this conference we hope to celebrate Corinne's approach to the complex question of local identity.