Authoring empire, inscribing power: monumental writing of the first emperors of Rome and China

This term’s seminar series showcases current research by Institute of Archaeology staff tackling critical questions in Archaeology and Heritage.

Jeremy Tanner will give the next presentation in the series entitled Authoring empire, inscribing power: monumental writing of the first emperors of Rome and China.

Open to all UCL staff, students and alumni!

Jeremy is Professor of Classical and Comparative Art and was the recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2019-2022) for research on the Axial Age and the Institution of Art in Ancient Greece and Early Imperial China.

His research incorporates sociological and anthropological approaches to art and explores comparative approaches to ancient, especially Greek and Roman art: variation in processes of institutional and cultural differentiation in artistic systems (Greece, China, India, early modern Europe); comparative religious iconography and comparative approaches to portraiture.

Programme

• 8 October: Corisande Fenwick - Reframing the early Islamic Mediterranean: archaeology, empire and economy in the not very “Dark Ages.”
• 15 October: Louise Martin - Desert hunting ‘kites’ in the Middle East: challenging concepts of marginality
• 22 October: Johanna Zetterstrom Sharp and J.C. Niala (Oxford) - In a fractured world, what can milk, our first food, tell us about shared loss?
• 29 October: Mike Parker Pearson - Stonehenge: the last two decades of conflict

[Reading Week - No seminar]

• 12 November: Jeremy Tanner - Authoring empire, inscribing power: monumental writing of the first emperors of Rome and China
• 19 November: Andrew Gardner - How do borders shape societies? Imperial borderlands from Roman Britain to New Spain
• 26 November: Yijie Zhuang - Rice fields and the ‘domestication’ of water in prehistoric China
• 3 December: Rachel King - What’s preservation by record for? Doing more with data from development-led archaeology