Ancient Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference

The first Ancient Borderlands International Graduate Student Conference, organized by the graduate students of the UCSB Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group, will be held on Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22, 2008.
Conference sessions begin at 1 p.m. on Friday the 21st, and at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday the 22nd. All sessions will be held in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), on the UCSB Main Campus. To see the full list of panels, paper titles, and participants, download the conference schedule.

The conference seeks to build on the foundation laid by contemporary scholars working with borderlands (frontier zones lying along given boundaries, limits beyond which something– a discipline, an ethnic group, a ‘nation’– transforms into something else) by applying borderlands theories and concepts to the ancient world. The articulation, maintenance, and even transgression of such boundaries is a vibrant activity that can be observed not only within material culture, but also in the rhetorical strategies adopted by ancient authors, in the political and military tactics pursued by those seeking or maintaining power, or in the establishment of ideological perimeters by believers looking to define or defend their faith.

Graduate students from various backgrounds and disciplines will present papers, and they will explore topics, methods and theoretical concepts including borders both physical and ideological, methodological approaches from archaeology to literature, and conceptual tools such as identity and space.

The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr. James F. Brooks, the President and CEO of the School of American Research and the author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (2002) as well as the forthcoming Mesa of Sorrows: Archaeology, Prophecy, and the Ghosts of the Awat’ovi Pueblo.

For directions and parking information, click here.

If you need any additional information about the conference, please contact Wyatt Rounds (awr@umail.ucsb.edu), with “Borderlands Conference” in the subject line.

This conference is sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Multi-Campus Research Group for Late Antiquity, the Graduate Division, and the departments of History, Religious Studies, Classics, Art History, Anthropology, and English at UCSB.