Events Calendar – British School at Athens

BSA / NHRF / ICS Autumn Lecture

Professor Judith Barringer (University of Edinburgh), “Seeking the Divine in a Faraway Place: Western Greeks and Sanctuaries Abroad”

ABSTRACT Greek colonies in Magna Graecia, founded in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, soon established their own sanctuaries, religious practices, temples, etc. in their new communities. Yet colonial cities and individuals within them invested great quantities of effort and money to make dedications and create bonds with sanctuaries very far from their own homes, even centuries after the founding of a given colonial city. In some cases, the deities were the same as those worshipped at nearby sanctuaries, yet the dedication was destined for a sanctuary on the mainland of Greece, the Aegean islands, or Asia Minor. This talk considers the benefits accrued to both western Greek donors and the sanctuaries they patronized and will touch on colonial western Greek notions of ethnicity, self-perception, and self-representation.

BIO Judy Barringer received her PhD in Classical Archaeology from Yale University in 1990. She has taught at several colleges and universities in the USA and joined the staff at the University of Edinburgh in 2005. Her scholarly work centers on the archaeology, art, and culture of Greece, particularly the intersection between art, myth, and religion, from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods. She is especially interested in why images, particularly sculpture and vase painting, appear as they do, where images and structures are placed, and how they acquire meaning for ancient patrons and viewers from their physical and social contexts.

She has received numerous awards, including fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, a British Academy Larger Research Grant, a Senior Fellowship at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna in 2011-2012, and a Marie Curie Fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (2013-2015) at the Freie Universität in Berlin. She also was elected as a Korrespondierendes Mitglied of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Her publications concentrate on vase painting iconology, myth and religion, social history, and contextual readings of sculpture in both public sanctuaries and private contexts. Her most recent monograph is Olympia: A Cultural History (Princeton University Press, 2021), and she published a collection of essays that she co-edited with François Lissarrague: Images at the Crossroads (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Her textbook, The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press 2014) received the  PROSE (Professional Scholarly Excellence) Award for the best textbook in the Arts and Humanities from the American Association of Publishers (2016) and the Bolchazy Book Award (2018). Forthcoming is a volume co-edited with Gunnel Ekroth and David Scahill, Logistics in Greek Sanctuaries: Exploring the Human Experience of Visiting the Gods (Brill). Her lecture is drawn from her current research project, for which she received another two-year scholarship from the Gerda Henkel Stiftung in 2022.

Hybrid lecture, online and in person