A Ph.D. dissertation considering nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural program. The variety reflects not only the different…[Read more]

The New Handbook of Syriac Literature (NHSL) is a born-digital TEI-encoded reference work for the study of Syriac literature. The first volume, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Syriaca Electronica, was published by Syriaca.org in 2016 using a simple TEI schema to describe a single genre (hagiography) (Saint-Laurent et al. 2016; see also Saint-Laurent…[Read more]

A paper delivered at in the 2017 Colloquia of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Considers how a group of sarcophagi from the Jewish catacombs of Rome reflect on the subject of Jewish art and Jewish patrons in Late Antiquity.

What did it mean to ‘be Jewish’ in the Greco-Roman world? Jews, Greeks and Romans will explore the myriad ways that Jewish communities across the Mediterranean engaged with Greco-Roman culture and constructed their own ways of being Jewish. Using texts, artifacts and images–from rabbinic commentaries to Roman catacombs–we will investigate…[Read more]

Front-matter and conclusions to my Ph.D. Dissertation (2017). The project considers nearly 200 sarcophagi from the late ancient necropoleis of Jewish communities at Beth She’arim and Rome. This corpus captures a wide range of the possibilities open to Jewish patrons as they went about acquiring or commissioning a sarcophagus and sculptural…[Read more]

A re-assessment of what we know about women known as hetairai in Classical Greece within the context of the elite women from the 6th and early 5th centuries BCE.

Arguably, the most famous myth told about Persephone is her abduction and marriage to Hades. The story clearly articulates the strong connection between marriage and death, and this episode became significant in both literature and religious practice in the wider classical Greek world. Reference to the story of Persephone’s abduction came to be u…[Read more]

This article looks at how Achilleus physically expresses his mourning following the death of Patroklos, in Homer’s Iliad.