This chapter examines the ways in which the Linear B ‘extra’ signs – syllabograms which can in certain circumstances replace the ‘core’ signs of the Linear B syllabary – are often used as evidence for the process by which this writing system was created from its parent writing system, Linear A, and thus, by extension, for reconstructing aspects of…[Read more]

Overview of demons and monsters in Mesopotamia, highlighting works in the Yale Babylonian Collection.

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

Due to the great interest for the first two sessions of the Digital Humanities Doctoral Seminar, we are very happy to announce two new online sessions on August 3rd & 4th and on September 3rd & 4th. This doctoral seminar is an introduction to Digital Humanities defined as the application of methods and tools from Information and Communication…[Read more]

A critical historiographical overview of art historical approaches to early medieval material culture, with a focus on the British Museum collections and their connections to religion.

In the winter of 476 A.D. the Ostrogoths, hungry and exhausted from wandering for months along the barren confines of the Byzantine Empire, wrote to Emperor Zeno in Constantinople requesting permission to enter the walled city of Epidaurum and just kinda crash and charge their phones. Closer to home, Orpheus walks Eurydice through a suburban…[Read more]

Interview with Martha Hennessy, the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, on her life, her anti-nuclear and peace activism, and ongoing trial as part of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

The iconography of the Horus cippus, an amulet popular in Egypt from the late Third Intermediate Period to Roman times (8th century BCE – 2nd century CE), is unexpectedly recapitulated in bronze “goddess plaques” of the 7-8th centuries CE made by Permian peoples – Finno-Ugric groups from the Ural region of northern Eurasia. The likely expla…[Read more]

Scholars have long noted the deeply intertextual features of Simaetha’s monologue in Idyll 2, including its Homeric, Sapphic and tragic resonances. In this contribution, however, I focus on an underexplored connection between Theocritus’ speaker and the Odyssean Penelope. I first highlight the Idyll’s pervasive engagement with heroic epic, dwell…[Read more]

This essay explores how and why three early Christian figures–Epiphanius, Romanos the Melode, and Ambrosiaster–have, at various times, been imagined as former Jews. By applying a hermeneutics of conversion, this essay argues that the significance of these three Christians’ ex-Jewishness lies not in its historicity (or falsity) but in the way…[Read more]

This paper examines the nature and basis of the competition between the dynasty based in Moray, to which the famous MacBeth belonged, and the mainline of Scottish kings.

This article examines the evidence for Pictish kingship being transmitted through the female line.

This paper discussed the micro demography of households in later prehistoric and early medieval northern Europe.

An examination of the career of the quondam king of Dublin and Northumbria Óláfr Kvaran.

The title is a terrible editorial imposition. This article argues that the term ‘Scotland’ though not attested before the late ninth-century (for Ireland) and the early tenth (for Alba) was probably already in use as the Northumbrian English term for Dál Riata in the time of Bede and certainly by the beginning of the Viking Age.

This paper attempts to correlate Bede’s account of the British king Caedualla, to whom he attributed Edwin’s death, with the information provided by Historia Brittonum and the Harleian pedigrees. It is suggested, inter alia, that his identification with Cadwallon ap Cadfan may be in error.

This paper examines the career and reputation of perhaps the longest reigning Pictish king, Onuist son of Urguist, who was a contemporary of Offa of Mercia.

This brief note reconsiders the standard translation of a brief passage in the Annals of Ulster and considers the implications of this alternate view.

In the nineteenth century the Pictish kingdom of Fortriu and the site of
the Battle of Nechtansmere were located by scholars in Menteith and
Strathearn and at Dunnichen in Forfarshire respectively. These identifications
have largely gone unchallenged. The purpose of this article is to
review the evidence for these locations and to suggest that…[Read more]