Participants

BELL, Sinclair

Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Regina. Bell will be in residence in Winnipeg in the 2007-2008 academic year as a post-doctoral fellow of the Canada Research Chair in Roman Archaeology. His project involves the decoration of venues for spectacles in the Roman Empire, particularly circus buildings for chariot racing. His work on this project and Roman sculpture more generally, in particular the intersection between image, identity and social realities, is particularly appropriate for the workshop’s interests in how different social actors in antiquity used imitation to convey different messages.

Elvins, Sarah

History Department, University of Manitoba. Elvins’ work on alternative forms of money during the Great Depression, currently supported by a research grant from SSHRC, provides a challenging case study illustrating the various forms of currency in transactions, set against a background of extensive contextual evidence, multiple layers of government interests, and individual perceptions. While making no claims (at this point) to directly comparable situations in Antiquity, Elvins’ expertise will provide a useful reminder of the possibilities even in modern economies.

Joyal, Mark

Department of Classics, University of Manitoba: A leading authority on the Platonic and related philosophical dialogues, Joyal’s close familiarity with the Platonic corpus and how authenticity of the texts was evaluated (at times falsely) in antiquity provides an important perspective from a philosophical tradition grounded from the beginning on the idea of imitating the ideas of a non-writing master, Socrates.

Lawall, Mark

Department of Classics, University of Manitoba: Over his career of studying transport amphorae (containers) from numerous sites around the Aegean, Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean, Lawall has been at the center of a movement in amphora studies towards recognition of regional styles of shape. For the Archaic through Hellenistic periods, there is no one else with a sufficiently extensive knowledge of published and unpublished finds to allow detailed exploration of the issue of imitative containers before the 1^st century BCE.

Liapis, Vayos

Centre des etudes classiques, Université de Montréal: His current research focuses on an example of imitative drama of late Classical Greece: Rhesus, once attributed to Euripides. From this background he is able to contribute valuable insights into the revealing signs of ancient ‘plagiarism’ (if that was what was happening) and the motives behind such imitation.

Meadows, Andrew - will not be able to attend

Margaret Thompson Curator, American Numismatic Society. Meadows has published extensively on Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic coinages. In the course of an on-going book-length project investigating the Hellenistic coinages of Caria, Meadows is developing new approaches to the production and function of imitative coinages. While most traditional approaches to the problem see imitative coinages as being produced and functioning on the periphery of various economic and social systems, Meadows seeks to situate some series of imitations more centrally as legitimate and viable alternative to “normative” coinages. This approach seriously problematizes the definition of “imitation” and the received notions of the production and consumption of coinage, which, by extension, might find resonance in the analysis of the other types of commodities and art under consideration in this meeting.

Moore, Jennifer

Classics Department, Trent University. Her thesis on the so-called pseudo-Koan amphoras of the early Imperial period addressed directly the classificatory problems encountered by imitative container forms. While her paper for the workshop will return to this issue, she also brings an extensive awareness of pottery production and other artistic and epigraphic practices in the province of Africa where Roman and indigenous traditions, values and tastes created a complex patchwork. As a result she will also be able to offer an important perspective of imitation in a multi-cultural environment.

Perry, Ellen

Classics Department, College of the Holy Cross. Perry’s scholarship on Roman sculpture viewed through the lens of ancient rhetorical values of emulation articulated a new and increasingly productive approach to the study of Roman statuary on its own terms. While her paper for the workshop turns in a new direction – the understanding of choices by Roman architects – her influential views of Roman sculpture will be invaluable as the workshop seeks to articulate modes of imitation in the arts.

Rauh, Nicholas

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Purdue University. His studies of amphora production sites from the late Roman period along the southern coast of Turkey (Cilicia) drew increased attention over the past decade to the problem of similar amphora forms being produced over wide areas. Both he and Lawall attended a conference in Athens in 2002 (published in 2004) at which the long-term historical problem of imitation of containers was raised, but could not be resolved. This workshop provides a more focused setting in which such problems can be considered in more detail.

Reger, Gary

History Department, Trinity College. Reger has published extensively on ancient economic practice. His book, Regionalism and Change in the Economy of Independent Delos, 1994, was groundbreaking for its detailed epigraphic and economic analysis; his commissioned studies for the Polis Centre project directed by Mogens Herman Hansen effectively expanded this analysis to include a larger number of the Aegean Islands. Reger’s economic interests have also focused on the problems of specific commodities, including, most recently, perfumes, which were as widely used and imitated as they are today. In addition to his contribution on the specific problems of perfumes, Reger’s broad knowledge of ancient commercial activity, including regulation, pricing, and commodity movement, will be a tremendous resource in our discussions.

Stirling, Lea

Department of Classics, University of Manitoba. Her book, The Learned Collector, and a lengthy article now at the copy-editing stage with Hesperia on an excavated Late Roman collection of sculpture from a villa at Corinth reflect Stirling’s long term interest in the intellectual environment, tastes and values that guided collectors. Subjects and styles imitated from centuries of Greco-Roman tradition dominate these collections, and this period is one of those few that provide us with sufficient evidence to explore contemporary tastes for/against imitative art.

Surtees, Allison - will not be able to attend

Department of Classics, Johns Hopkins University, PhD candidate. Surtees is currently in residence at the Canadian Institute in Greece, Athens, as the Alföldi-Rosenbaum Fellow, where she is completing her dissertation entitled Ideal Sculpture and Sculpting Ideologies: the Pouring Satyr and Kopienkritik. Using the Pouring Satyr as a case study, her project re-examines traditional goals and approaches to studying Roman copies, and to examine more broadly the iconographic role of the satyr in both Greece and Rome.

Van Alfen, Peter

Margaret Thompson Curator, American Numismatic Society. Van Alfen has examined, in the course of several articles and chapters (e.g., “Problems in ancient imitative and counterfeit coinage,” 2005), the typology of imitative coinages and their role in ancient economies, as well as the specific role of imitative Athenian coinages in ancient Levantine, Egyptian, and South Arabian economies. His work on the Near Eastern imitation of Athenian coinage is currently being expanded into a book that deals with the economic, social, and political aspects of these coins. Another book project, a revision of his dissertation, “Pant’agatha: commodities in Levantine-Aegean trade during the Persian period, 6^th-4^th c. BC,” examines in part imitative commodities and their regulation in commerce. As one of the co-organizers, van Alfen’s work with a variety of problems of imitation in antiquity will help to guide the program and its goals.

Weir, Robert

Classics Department, University of Windsor. As numismatist for the Stymphalos archaeological project, Weir has an interest in the choices ancient states made in what to depict on their coinage and how individuals made various efforts to pass off various forms of imitative or counterfeit coinage. The latter interest formed the basis for a paper given at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Canadian West on the theme of Irrationality in the Ancient World. This broader perspective along with his paper on imitative numismatic imagery will be important for the workshop’s focus on the economic impact of imitations on transactions.