International Conference on Alexander the Great: Alexander and Macedon
South Dakota State University – Sioux Falls, SD – September 4-7, 2024
Announcing the next instalment of the series of international conferences on Alexander the Great.
Alexander and Macedon, held at South Dakota State University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, September 4-7, 2024
2024 heralds the 2,350th anniversary of Alexander’s final major battle of the Hydaspes as well as the so-called Hyphasis mutiny, the death of his famed horse Bukephalos, Alexander’s journey down the Indus River, the start of the Mallian campaign, and the creation of Nearchos’ exploratory naval expedition.
Papers are welcome on any aspect of Alexander the Great and his era, or on the history of Macedon. A particular focus is on Alexander’s influence on Macedon and vice versa.
Papers from any relevant discipline are particularly encouraged to facilitate a multi-disciplinary discussion.
The conference is aimed equally at postgraduate students, early career researchers and established academics.
The keynote session on Thursday September 5th, will be delivered by Edward Anson, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock,and Waldemar Heckel, Research Fellow in the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.
There will also be a public afternoon workshop involving experimental history in recreating a sarissa phalanx using replica weapons.
Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief bio to the organizer, Graham Wrightson (alexanderconference@yahoo.com ) BEFORE March 30th 2024.
Crab! A Boeotian Greek model of a shield in the British Museum, museum number 1895,1026.5 under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Responses at the International Ancient Warfare Conference 2023 made me wonder whether something I take for granted is obvious to other people interested in ancient Greece.
Today our armies are parallel societies or total institutions. They take in individual recruits, separate them from their prior friends and relations, and teach them everything they will need while they are isolated from their civilian associates. They re-organize these recruits into a new hierarchy of units for both everyday and tactical purposes (people in the same platoon both live and fight together, at least in the field). Armies like the army of Classical Athens were nothing like this and yet they fought.
What questions can we ask about a spear? Find out at IAWC 2022
The latest International Ancient Warfare Conference will happen online from Thursday 23 June to Saturday 25 June under the sponsorship of Prof. Graham Wrightson in South Dakota. I am speaking in session 14 from 10.45 to 12.15 Saturday. The topic I picked is “Get to the Point: What Questions Should We Ask About a Spear?”
Sessions are open to the public and will not be publicly recorded (I may share my talk afterwards). There is no website for the conference, but here are a list of panels with links. All times are US Central Time (UTC -5.00).
On Friday 8 April from 13.00 to 15.15 Harvard time I will be speaking at an online conference, The Battle of Plataea 2.5k: Questions, Contexts, Echos. I believe registration is open to the public and panels may be released online in some form. This is not related to the reenactment event being organized in Greece.... Continue reading: Upcoming Online Conference Plataea 2.5k
From Dr. Emma Cole on Medium: Immersive experiences represent one of the highest growth areas within the UK’s cultural industries. Their centrality to the creative economy was recognised in the UK Creative Industries Sector Deal (2018), which estimated that the immersive content market would be worth over £30 billion by 2025 and pledged to invest... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Conference on Antiquity and Immersivity, Bristol UK, 29-30 March 2021
Yes, the cat armour/mouse armour guy is based in Calgary!
Lorica Clothing in the United States is organizing an online armour scholarship conference from 3 to 9 May using Zoom (warning! security and privacy catastrophe). Read more
Looking east along the footbridge over the Red River at Winnipeg. Photo by Sean Manning, October 2016.
In October I got to attend the conference on technical military writing at the University of Winnipeg. Aside from giving me a chance to have some A&W and Timbits (somehow Wienerschnitzel and Quarkbällchen are not the same) and catch up on academic gossip, I got to hear a great set of papers.
The presentations focused on Greek texts from Aeneas Tacticus and Xenophon in the early 4th century BCE to emperor Leo VI around 900 CE, with one group of three papers on Vegetius. Three others focused on Xenophon, leaving six on miscellaneous topics and authors, and one on methodology. Only two of the thirteen focused on tactical writing in any language.
CFP: EXPERIENCING WARFARE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD STUDENT CONFERENCE CLASSICS GRADUUATE PROGRAM ─ BROCK UNIVERSITY FEBRUARY 6, 2016 From Stephanie Culp The Classics Graduate Program at Brock University is pleased to announce an interdisciplinary conference exploring the experience of warfare in the ancient world. How were the ancients affected by warfare? What can the literature... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Conference on Experiencing Warfare in the Ancient World, Brock University, February 2016
GREEK AND ROMAN MILITARY MANUALS: GENRE, THEORY, INFLUENCE WINNIPEG, MANITOBA, CANADA 21 & 22 OCTOBER 2016 While scholars acknowledge the ubiquity of military manuals in antiquity, systematic study of this genre has yet to be undertaken To be sure, military manuals are enigmatic and at the same time intrinsically fascinating texts. This workshop seeks to... Continue reading: Cross-Post: Conference on Greek and Roman Military Manuals, Winnipeg MB, October 2016
Settling ground, modernizing city fathers, and fire storms could not destroy the fifteenth-century town gate of Lübeck
Earlier in November I attended the eighth Melammu Symposium in Kiel (with an excursion to Lübeck on the day after). This year was smaller than last, with about 30 attendees after some people who had agreed to give posters dropped out. Participants specialized in a wide range of places, times, and methodologies, from Christian Sogdian book culture about the year 1,000 to women in Elam in the third millennium BCE. As often happens, talks and the formal responses to groups of talks ran long. This week, I think I will write about some of the posters and talks related to the Achaemenid empire or military history.
Fabian Winklbauer presented a poster on the government of the Achaemenid empire. This is a proverbially difficult subject, since the documents are not self-explanatory, while the Greek and Latin literary tradition does not worry about such details. On the other hand, we do have a great many documents in many languages, and the Aramaic documents from Bactria suggest that the situation in one region from which few documents survived resembled that in regions where more are preserved. I hope to see more of his work in future years.
