AAMW5250 - Borderlines: Art and Artifact in the Roman Empire

What made art and artifacts `Roman', or not, in a Roman world? `Roman provincial art` is an active scholarly category. This seminar reframes it, to test productive models to understand visual culture outside the empire’s Italian heartland from the Late Republic into Late Antiquity, in the Roman polity’s interactions with many peoples in situations of diaspora, colonization, hegemony, conflict, economic exchange, and religious interaction. As `Rome’ expanded, cultural relations across many borderlines – social, ethnic, territorial - potentially became cultural politics. A traditional topic for that has been Roman interaction with Greek culture. This seminar extends that range, while tackling `Hellenization’, as we reflect on models of `Romanization’, globalism and identity formation within the imperium’s boundaries in its provinces and client kingdoms, and also at its frontier zones. Various disciplines apply: art history, archaeology, history, and more. Case studies, evolved with students, may range from Britain to Iran, northern Africa to the Black Sea in space and, in time, from interactions with the Hellenistic East and West and with Iron Age Europe, to the age of Germanic, Sasanian and Ummayad conquests of Roman terrain, ca 3rd c. BCE-7th c. CE. The market in art and artifact, the nature and status of makers, and conditions of patronage and viewing are key considerations. Private and public objects, images, architecture and urbanism, and landscapes can all concern us, as we try out disciplinary approaches that take in eg cultural appropriation, translation and hybrity, creolization, discrepant experience, object agency, and communities of taste and style. `Ethnicity’ is a loaded concept in ancient Mediterranean studies, as is `race;’ our course must engage those, and the ways in which things and styles have been made to serve those terms. And who owns, is heir to, the cultural legacies we look at, and how to name them, are problems that tangle with current national identity formation, and academic and museum practice. Our own Museum's holdings can make topics. Students are welcome to bring in interests in language and text cultures, in disciplines outside art history and archaeology, and in other world cultures and epochs.