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.

Article on parental language within small groups in the Greco-Roman world with special attention to fathers or mothers of the synagogue.

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]

Exploration of the ways boy-slaves’ bodies were objectified in first century CE Roman art and literature.

“Curial Communiqué: Memory, Propaganda, and the Roman Senate House,” in Aspects of Ancient Institutions and Geography: Studies in Honor of Richard J.A. Talbert, Impact of Empire Series, edited by Lee L. Brice and Daniëlle Slootjes (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 84-102.

“Curial Communiqué: Memory, Propaganda, and the Roman Senate House,” in Aspects of Ancient Institutions and Geography: Studies in Honor of Richard J.A. Talbert, Impact of Empire Series, edited by Lee L. Brice and Daniëlle Slootjes (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 84-102.

As the 2017-18 academic job cycle came to an end I found myself, for the first time in five years, in the enviable position of not having to resume my search for employment again in the fall, thanks to a two-year position at a very eminent institution. This good fortune has prompted me to compile my reflections on the classical archaeology job…[Read more]

This is an Accepted Manuscript, for an article forthcoming in Antiquity (2019), and remains subject to pre-publication type-editing and proofing. Please cite as James M. Harland, ‘Memories of Migration? So-called “Anglo-Saxon” Burial Costume of the 5th Century AD,’ Antiquity 93 (2019). A link to the final publication at Cambridge University Press…[Read more]

This chapter examines the impact of a putative oral Homer upon the work of recent performance-makers. The influence of oral-poetic theories is (as yet) an under-explored area of study, neglected by scholars whose literary expertise leads them to focus on dramatic texts and production histories, with each revisionary text or production regarded as…[Read more]

This paper argues that the Augustan period witnessed a dramatic reconception of Roman religion—a reconception that played a vital role in the emperor’s efforts to create a unified sense of identity that included both Romans and Italians. Instead of a religion of place tied to specific historical developments, both Virgil in the Aeneid and A…[Read more]

This study juxtaposes the concerns of Catholicos Timothy I (r. 780–823), leader of the Church of the East, with those of al-Jāḥiẓ (about 776–868/9), a popular Muslim writer, regarding the dangers for each community when Christians appear as plaintiffs or defendants in Islamic courts. Timothy’s Canons attempt to obviate some of the reasons…[Read more]

Developments in Early Judaism research since the publication of the 1986 first edition of Early Judaism and Its Modern Interpreters

A discussion of the different lists of Canaanite nations.