The Comparative Literature Department cordially invites you to join us for this year’s Andrea Rosenthal Memorial Lecture, Bad Mothers: Niobe and Petrified Grief, presented Rebecca Comay from the University of Toronto. This event will take place Thursday, April 25, at 5:30 PM at the Brown Faculty Club.

Rebecca Comay is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she is also an associate member of the Centre for Jewish Studies, the Program in Literature and Critical Theory, and the Dept of German. She has published widely in various areas, including German philosophy (mainly Hegel and the Marxist/Frankfurt School tradition), contemporary critical theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art. Her books include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011) and The Dash - The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (co-authored with Frank Ruda, MIT, 2017). She is currently working on two book projects – Deadlines (Literally) and Dramaturgies of the Dialectic – as well as an essay collection with the title On Persistence.

As always, this event is free and open to the public and a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!

Making Muzhiming: Collaboration and the Production of the Chinese Entombed Epitaph, 600-900

At every stage of its production, from conception and composition through revision and manufacture, the late medieval Chinese entombed epitaph (muzhiming 墓誌銘) was the product of collaboration. During these collaborations, details could be added or removed, contexts and timelines refined, content tuned for more positive audience response, or material form shaped to achieve specific ends. In this paper, I explore examples of collaboration occurring at four stages of production—pre-writing, composition, editing, and inscription—and highlight how approaching muzhiming as products of collaborative remembering can help us better interpret these textual artifacts as well as provide insight into medieval commemorative practices more broadly.

Daiana Rivas-Tello, a doctoral candidate in Brown University’s Department of Anthropology, will discuss her research in an informal talk, titled “Relocating Crafting Communities: Inka Imperialism and the Huancas Mitmaqkuna in Amazonas, Peru”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Georgia Andreou, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, will lead a discussion on Zoom around the current state of archaeology in Gaza and the impact of the war, entitled, “In the Name of ‘Heritage’: Gazan Archaeology before and after October 2023”. The discussion will begin on Monday, April 22nd at noon, and is open to the public. Preregistration is required: https://tinyurl.com/5n6zmcv4 

Dr. Andreou is a research associate at the Maritime Endangered Archaeology Project (MarEA), the aim of which is the rapid and comprehensive documentation and assessment of endangered maritime archaeological sites. At MarEA she has used HER expertise in GIS and remote sensing to produce a record of endangered sites in Eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula. She has also developed two separate sub-projects. The first examines the impact of tropical cyclones on coastal archaeological sites in Oman. The second project contextualises maritime archaeology in the broader ecological and humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Andreou’s research examines how traditional perceptions of the ancient environment affect the way we collect archaeological data and produce broader historical narratives. Her most recently funded project establishes a baseline for the study of maritime cultural heritage in the Gaza strip through a combination of remote sensing and in situ documentation of vulnerable sites dating between the Neolithic and the Iron Age. She is also one of the co-directors of the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environment Project, an international, interdisciplinary project excavating two Late Bronze Age sites on the island of Cyprus.

Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in Brown University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture, will discuss her research in an informal talk titled, “Extraction and Liquidation, from Rayy to Russia: Iranian Ceramics in a Global Art Market”

For a full list of Archaeology Brown Bag talks, please visit our blog: sites.brown.edu/archaeology/

Céline Debourse, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University

Making Priest and Temple in Late Achaemenid and Hellenistic Babylon (484–60 BCE)

In 484 BCE, Xerxes crushed several Babylonian revolts against his rule. One of the results was an almost complete disruption of Babylonian temple life as it had existed up until that point. While in most places the cult never resumed, in the city of Babylon the worship of the gods was eventually reinstated and even flourished again. In this talk, I ask how Babylon’s community undertook this process of rebuilding the temple, both in terms of how the worship of the gods was actually organized and how the rebuilding process was ideally envisioned and legitimized. After all, these people’s undertaking was not so straightforward, as the foreign kings who ruled over them no longer cared for the gods of Babylon.

About Céline Debourse

Céline Debourse is an Assyriologist specializing in the languages, history, and religion of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of methods and disciplines, from rigorous philological analysis, through historical criticism and literary studies, to the application of sociological and anthropological theories. She furthermore aims to embed Babylonia in wider Near Eastern history and to foster dialogues between Assyriology and other disciplines.

Her research centers around two broad themes. First, she is interested in the final stages of cuneiform history and its reactions to and interactions with foreign imperial rule. In her first book, Of Priests and Kings: The Babylonian New Year Festival in the Last Age of Cuneiform Culture (Brill, 2022), she studies cuneiform priestly writings created under Persian, Hellenistic, and Parthian rule. She shows how this Late Babylonian Priestly Literature served to strengthen group-internal bonds and foster a strong priestly identity in a time of foreign domination. Debourse’s work has also focused on the socio-economic aspects of Babylonian temple households post-484 BCE, challenging long-standing assumptions of cultic continuity and shedding new light on the question of the impact of foreign rule on a former “hegemonic” religious system. In her current book project, provisionally titled Babylon Beyond Cuneiform (331 BCE–224 CE), she seeks to study the latest history of the city of Babylon from a comparative perspective and to contend with the challenges presented by the dwindling and eventual disappearance of the cuneiform record.

The second main theme in her research is ancient ritual. Her interest in this topic ranges from the cuneiform textual tradition reflecting ritual to the application of modern theories to ancient ritual. Moreover, she explores how ritual can be an innovative and useful tool for historical research (see the co-edited volume, Ceremonies, Feasts, and Festivities in Ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean World, Zaphon, 2023). She is currently working on a comprehensive study of the corpus of Late Babylonian ritual texts, which will include updated editions and extensive analysis.

About the Sachs Lecture Series

The Sachs Lecture is one of three lectures named after founding members of the Departments of Egyptology and History of Mathematics, which were merged in 2006 to form the current Department of Egyptology & Assyriology: Richard Parker (Egyptology), Otto Neugebauer (History of Exact Science in Antiquity), and Abraham Sachs (Assyriology). After receiving his doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University in 1939, Abe Sachs worked on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary at the University of Chicago, where a chance meeting with Otto Neugebauer led to Brown University in 1941. After two years at Brown as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, Sachs became one of the founding members of the History of Mathematics Department (instituted in 1943), eventually serving as its chair. Sachs collaborated on important contributions to the history of mathematics and astronomy, and, together with Albrecht Goetze, he founded the Journal of Cuneiform Studies in 1947. Sachs was a beloved teacher and respected colleague, and after his retirement he remained active at Brown as an adjunct professor until his untimely death in 1983.

Anna Soifer, a doctoral candidate in Archaeology and the Ancient World, will present her dissertation, “Landscapes of Practice and Community in 7th-4th c. BCE Etruria: Lived Experiences of Ceramic and Metal Production”, in a public lecture. All are welcome.

About the Event
Between 1820 and 1920, the largest single population of human remains in American museums like the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, and Harvard’s Peabody was from the Andes. By collecting these “ancient Peruvian” mummies and skulls, anthropologists sought a foundation for the historical study of race worldwide. But in doing so, they compounded a far longer struggle for the ancestral dead in the Andes—one that began when Spain invaded the empire of Tawantinsuyu in 1532 and confiscated its Inca ancestors. This longer history of the theft of Indigenous bodies makes clear the responsibility of U.S. museums to the history of supposedly more distant populations, whose racialization fueled grave-robbing throughout the Americas. But it also reveals how Peruvian intellectuals and grave-openers, some of Inca and Andean descent, used the dead to transform their study, curating these “scientific ancestors” as evidence of historical precedence, sovereignty, climactic care, healing, and national belonging. This work preceded North American efforts at decolonization by decades, if not centuries, and challenges our understanding of what it might mean to mummify a museum.

About the Speaker
Christopher Heaney is a historian of Latin America, with research interests in the history of science, indigeneity, museums, race, and deathways in the Andes, Americas, and the World. He is the author of two books. His most recent, “Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology” (Oxford University Press, 2023), is a history of the collection and display of Inca mummies and ancient Peruvian skulls in the Americas, spanning from the 16th century to the present. His prior book, “Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones and the Search for Machu Picchu” (2010), was a history of Yale University’s conflict with Peru over the excavation of Machu Picchu, and advocated for the return of the site’s human remains and gravegoods to Peru. It was published in Spanish as “Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la Busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas” in 2012. His third book will be a history of the colonial laws regulating grave-robbing in the Anglo-Iberian Atlantic World, and their assault upon Indigenous sovereignty.

At Penn State, he trains undergraduate and graduate students in Colonial and Modern Latin American history, the history of Peru and the Incas, the history of science, and the cultural history of United States-Latin American relations. His approach to teaching presumes a Latin America that has always been modern, and an Americas and Atlantic World shaped by movements, infrastructures, and knowledges of Native peoples. In 2012, he co-founded and was the Editor-in-Chief of The Appendix, a journal of narrative and experimental history. From 2016 to 2018 he was the Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times.