Ottawa Chapter Program
Fall 2020

Page updated October 5, 2020
CIMS will be contacting you in the coming days with all the details on the upcoming events and with specific instructions to join in on Zoom.  
Sunday, September 27th, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location: This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM

    • Lecturer: Dr. Carolyn Laferrière,at the Yale University Art Gallery

    Theme:
    Imagining the Sights ad Sounds of Ancient Ritual at the Yale University Art Galery



    Biographical Notes

    Dr. Carolyn M. Laferrière is a Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow at the University of Southern California’s new Center for the Premodern World. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Associate with Archaia, Yale University’s program for the interdisciplinary study of the ancient world.

    She earned her Ph.D. in 2017 from Yale in the Department of the History of Art. Her current book project, Seeing the Songs of the Gods: Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art, examines the significance of divine music in ancient Greek art, exploring how musical sounds are communicated in a visual medium and the effect that images of the gods’ performance had upon ancient viewers. In 2018-19 she curated Sights and Sounds of Ancient Ritual, an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, which took a cross-cultural approach to its investigation into the sensory experience of ancient ritual practice by focusing upon objects created and used by premodern worshippers in the Mediterranean, China, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific region.

    Abstract:
    TBD
    Sunday, October 4th, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location: This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM.

    • In co-sponsorship with the Ottawa Chapter of AIA

    Lecturer: Rita Freed, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

    Theme:
    Exhibiting Nubea in Today's World.


    Biographical notes:

    Rita Freed obtained her at BA Wellesley College; PhD (Near Eastern Art and Archaeology, New York University).She is currently Curator, Department of Ancient Egyptian, Nubian and Near Eastern Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1989-present) and Adjunct Professor, Wellesley College (1991-present).

    Her previous positions included: Exhibition assistant of Egyptian Art, Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1978-1982); Curator, University of Memphis (1983); Founding Director, Egyptian Gallery, University of Memphis (1984); research assistant at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
    Selected publications include: Pharaohs of the Sun: Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen (co-authored, 1999); Ramses II: The Great Pharaoh and His Time (1987). Also numerous exhibition catalogs.

    Abstract:
    “Black Lives Matter,” “colonialism,” “institutionalized racism,”…these are but a few of the issues confronting us today. Can archaeology – and specifically Nubian archaeology and culture make a positive contribution? I will argue a definitive “yes!” in this presentation, which will showcase the superb Nubian collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, while owning up to past mistakes and addressing possible ways of correcting them to make ancient Nubia relevant in the world of the 21st Century.
    Sunday, November 8th, 2020 at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM

    • In co-sponsorship with the Ottawa Chapter of AIA

    Lecturer: Professor Carl Knappett , Department of Art, University of Toronto.

    Theme:
    Creativity in Aegean Bronze Art.


    Biographical notes:

    Biographical Notes Professor Knappett obtained his PhD in Archaeology at Cambridge University, UK, in 1997 and his BA/MA in Archaeology at St. John’s College, Cambridge. He has been Professor at the University of Toronto since 2012 (Walter Graham/Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory).

    He had several appointments in both the Department of Art and Anthropology and Classics at the University of Toronto, as well as member of several Committees in Paris, Leuven, Belgium, London UK and was a Getty Scholar at the Research Institute in Los Angeles. He obtained several grants from SSHRC for his excavation projects in the Palace and Landscape at Palaikastro, a Minoan harbour town in eastern Crete (PALAP). He is the author and editor of An Archaeology of Interaction (2011), Network Analysis in Archaeology (2013) and Thinking through Material Culture (2005).

    Abstract:
    Professor Knappett brings novel perspectives to Aegean Bronze Age art that are inspired by theory drawn from art, archaeology and anthropology. He identifies distinct actions such as modelling, combining and imprinting whereby meaning is scaffolded through the materials themselves. By showing how these actions work, Knappett brings life to the fascinating art of Minoan Crete. He makes an argument for not just how creativity emerges through specific material engagements but also why creativity might be especially valued at particular moments.
    Sunday, November 15th, 2020, at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location: This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM

    • Lecturer: Professor C. Michael Sampson,, University of Manitoba.

    Theme:
    New Sappho and Digital Forensics. Technology in the Service of Scholarly Integrity.

    Biographical notes:

    Professor Sampson is Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Department of Classics at the University of Manitoba. He obtained his PhD from the University of Michigan, his MA from Dalhousie University and his BA from University of King’s College.

    Abstract:
    Sappho, the enigmatic Greek poet from the Island of Lesbos, was praised for her poetic style and ridiculed for her supposed immorality even in antiquity. Subject to controversies about her life, her family, and of course, her sexuality, her poetry continues to be a focus of fascination and study. Her work survives almost entirely in small but precious fragments.

    In 2014 a surprise announcement that two new fragmentary poems preserved on papyrus had been discovered, one of which was five stanzas long, made international headlines and excited scholars around the world. Soon thereafter, however, details of the discovery began to raise eyebrows: the provenance of the fragments—their origins, acquisition, and ownership history—were all very murky.

    Research has subsequently shown that the history of the fragments is entangled in the sensational allegations, featured repeatedly in major media outlets since 2019, of the removal of and illicit trade in Oxyrhynchus papyri from the collection of the Egypt Exploration Society at Oxford. 
    Wednesday, November 18th, 2020, at 7:00 p.m. ( please note different time)
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM. Click here to join the lecture.


    • Joint lecture of the Toronto and Ottawa Chapters of CIMS.


    Lecturer: Professor Timothy Harrison,, University of Toronto.

    Theme:
    Portraits of a Forgotten Kingdom: Tayanat sculptures and other recent discoveries on the Plain of Antioch in South Eastern Turkey.

    Biographical notes:

    Timothy P. Harrison is professor of Archaeology at the University of Toronto. He specializes in Near Eastern archeology of Bronze and Iron Age civilizations a well as its ethnicity, urbanism, various networks and ceramic analysis. He obtained is PhD from the University of Chicago and is Chair and Graduate Coordinator of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at both the Archaeological Institute of America and the University of Toronto

    Summary:
    The excavations at Tell Tayanat on the Plain of Antioch in southern Turkey and the recently discovered Lady of Tayanat will be included in Professor Harrison’s lecture as well as other recent discoveries on the Plain of Antioch near Gaziantep. He has presented the results of his excavations to CIMS on quite a few occasions and is well-known to CIMS as he was a Board member for several years.
    Sunday, February 21st, 2021, at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM. Click here to join the lecture.


    • CIMS is co-sponsoring this lecture with AIA-Ottawa.


    Lecturer: Professor George W.M Harrison,, Carleton University.

    Theme:
    The Beauty and Enigma of Roman Crete

    Summary:
    Tourists are attracted to Crete for the splendours of Minoan Knossos and other Bronze Age sites. The architecture of Roma Crete is as substantial as the earlier periods and the importance of Crete to the Roman Empire rivals the earlier periods. Dr. Harrison looks at the key sites but also presents material from sites tourists rarely see. The paper balances information with interpretation of the data and limitations of the evidence, particularly as applied to Romanization. Comparisons with Ottoman Crete/Crete during enosis with Greece are made especially in two areas: the micro-economies of thrift and the crucial influence of new technologies on culture. Dr. Harrison first started working on Crete in 1980 as a graduate student and in 2008 was elected to the Société internationale des amis de Nikos Kazantzakis.
    Sunday, March 7th, 2021, at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM. Click here to join the lecture.


    • This is a Joe DiGeso lecture co-sponsored with CIMS Toronto Chapter


    Lecturer: Professor Antonio Ricci, York University.

    Theme:
    Renaissance Readers and Their Books: Representations of a Fugitive Act

    Biographical notes:

    Antonio Ricci is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University and a specialist on the book culture of the Italian Renaissance. He has held fellowships at the Houghton Library, the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, and the Newberry Library, as well as awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is currently editing a book on the reading history of the Orlando Furioso.l as its ethnicity, urbanism, various networks and ceramic analysis. He obtained is PhD from the University of Chicago and is Chair and Graduate Coordinator of the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at both the Archaeological Institute of America and the University of Toronto
    Summary:
    The image of a person holding a book appears frequently in Renaissance art and literature. The privileged status of texts in humanist culture and their proliferation after the coming of print technology contributed to the motif’s popularity. This lecture will examine depictions of readers in paintings and poems of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The intention is to recover aspects of the experience of reading during the period and, at the same time, to gain a measure of insight into what remains an elusive phenomenon. What does reading mean? What is it, really, that we are doing when we engage in this fundamentally human act? The Renaissance offers us intriguing answers.
    Sunday, March 21st, 2021, at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM. Click here to join the lecture.


    • Joint lecture of the Toronto and Ottawa Chapters of CIMS.


    Lecturer: Professor Rebecca Flemming , Jesus College, Cambridge University.

    Theme:
    Anatomy as Religion: The Body in Ancient Italian Votive Practice

    Summary:
    Tens of thousands of votive objects, mostly in terracotta, survive from religious sanctuaries across Republican central Italy (from the fourth to the first centuries BC). Many are in the shape of body parts, external and internal, single and multiple, even displayed within a whole human torso or figure, and they are usually interpreted as representing engagements with the divine about health and healing, broadly construed. They offer key insights into both religion in early Italy and ideas about the human body. This lecture first offers an overview of the extant material and the cult practice, the address and thanks to the gods that these artefacts embody, summarizing both recent finds and new scholarship on the phenomenon of the anatomical ex-voto. The focus then turns to the ‘polyviscera’, the objects which depict multiple organs, in a range of presentational styles, and to the meanings they might have, both in terms of the ways the human body was understood in antiquity, and the ways divinities might be invited to intervene in it.
    Sunday, April 18th, 2021, at 2:00 p.m.
  • Location:This lecture can be accessed via ZOOM.

    • Lecturer: Professor Michael B. Cosmopoulos, University of Missouri-St. Louis.

    Theme:
    Digging Homer. The Mycenaean Palace at Iklaina and the Birth of Greek Epic Poetry

    Biographical notes:

    Dr. Michael B. Cosmopoulos is the Hellenic Government-Karakas Family Foundation Professor of Archaeology and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Before coming to UMSL, he was Professor of Classics at the University of Manitoba. His research interests are the culture, religion, and political organization of ancient Greece, about which he was published 16 books and over 100 scholarly articles and papers. He has excavated at several ancient sites in Greece and Ukraine and is currently directing the Iklaina Archaeological Project. For his teaching he has been awarded several teaching awards, including the Archaeological Institute of America Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the Academy of Science St. Louis, of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Corresponding Member of the Athens Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a National Geographic Society Explorer. For more information please visit www.michaelcosmopoulos.org
    Summary:
    For thousands of years Homer’s Iliad has remained the classic tale of love, honor, and war. Exciting archaeological discoveries in the past 150 years have unearthed the great palaces of the Homeric heroes and revived the fascinating society of the Mycenaeans. In antiquity itself, and in our memory of antiquity, the great palaces at Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, and Troy stand at the crossroads between myths and historical reality. The world of the Mycenaeans still holds, however, many surprises. Recent excavations at the site of Iklaina have brought to light one of the capitals of the Mycenaean state of Pylos. Massive Cyclopean structures, monumental buildings decorated with beautiful wall paintings, advanced urban infrastructure, and the earliest known records of state bureaucracy challenge current knowledge about the origins and operation of Mycenaean states and allow us a glimpse into previously unknown aspects of the Homeric epics. In this illustrated lecture Professor Cosmopoulos will present the exciting archaeological discoveries at Iklaina and discuss their significance for the historical foundation of Homer's epics.

    CONTACT

    For any further information please contact via e-mail:
    Louise Terrillon-Mackay, President   →
    Or by telephone: 819-684-8768