Tracing an early rabbinic approach to the human, this article analyzes how the Tannaim (early Palestinian Jewish sages) of the Mishnah and Tosefta (redacted ca. early 3rd century CE) set the human side by side with other species, and embedded their account within broader considerations of reproduction, zoology and species crossings. The human here…[Read more]

Article exploring the use of sibling language in associations beyond Judean or Christian groups.

A chapter exploring rivalries among groups in ancient Greek cities of Asia Minor.

Article exploring Jewish or Judean groups in the context of associations at Hierapolis.

This article makes several claims. It argues that the genre of “pilgrim’s literature” is present in rabbinic sources, and identifies rabbinic pilgrimage itineraries. Secondly, it shows that aside from the expected melancholic post-Temple itinerary, there exist itineraries for Babylon and for biblical conquest that do a very dif…[Read more]

Article on ancient biographical or autobiographical stories regarding journeys in pursuit of wisdom.

Article on banqueting within associations.

This is the complete second, fully revised edition of the book with links to inscriptions on the AGRW website. (First edition was published by Fortress in 2003).

Article surveying economic conditions within associations in Asia Minor and on Greek islands.

Book that explores processes of identification within various small group situations in the Greco-Roman world.

Article comparing representations of domestic, civic, and imperial violence in novels and in apocryphal acts.

PDF of Bosporan section of work only in keeping with the publisher’s policy.

Article that explores stories of wild banquets within the context of ethnographic discourses.

Chapter introducing and surveying the intersection of the gods and travel in the Greco-Roman world.

Article exploring and challenging the notion of the decline of the city as a preliminary to the study of rivalries among associations.

Horace is sometimes said to profess in the Odes a “poetics of presence”, a philosophical or aesthetic orientation that privileges the here and now. This paper examines how such an orientation toward the present might interact with the poet’s use of the future tense and especially with those future verbs that seem to postpone focal events. It is co…[Read more]

In Books 1-3 of the Odes, Horace makes clear a hierarchy of divinity through the structures of lyric address and distinguishes the gods and goddesses of his poetic preference from the preeminent deities of Augustan state cult. Specifically, he equivocates masterfully as he approaches Apollo and Jupiter while elevating Mercury, a minor figure in…[Read more]

This article introduces a new perspective, the history of vision, into the study of rabbinic literature. Specifically it examines how rabbinic visual regimes dealt with those objects and images that it designated as idols. It argues that rabbis took seeing seriously and that they developed a set of strategies to shape the viewing of problematic…[Read more]

Studies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of c…[Read more]

Studies of Egyptian Late Period statuary often assume that the extant corpus is a representative sample of the artistic output of the Twenty-Sixth to Thirty-First Dynasties (c. 664–332 BCE). This assumption ignores the various human processes that affect the survival of statues after their initial dedication. In particular, the Roman practice of c…[Read more]