Panel: Herculaneum: Image and Text, January 2023.
Proposed by: American Friends of Herculaneum
Organizers: David Sider and Carol Mattusch
The American Friends of Herculaneum invite proposals for papers to be given at its sponsored panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) in January, 2023, to be held in New Orleans. In the 285 years since the first official excavations began in 1738, Herculaneum has been a study in contradictions. The site has yielded more undisturbed sculptures, paintings, and texts than any other Roman site, many of the finds undisturbed since the eruption of 79 CE. And yet the difficulty of access to the deeply buried site has made excavation extraordinarily complicated, and the attempts at reading texts embedded in charred papyrus rolls have been thwarted on many occasions. Developing technologies have led to recent breakthroughs for philologists and archaeologists, and allowed the opening of much more of the site to visitors. Papers may be on any subject related to Herculaneum - architecture, sculpture, painting, texts, excavation, conservation, later history, recent finds, with special emphasis on new technologies, new initiatives, and new practices.
Abstracts for 15-20-minute papers should be submitted electronically as Word documents by March 7, 2022 to Nancy Smith (nas1@nyu.edu), preferably with the subject heading “abstract_Herculaneum_SCS2023”, along with a cover letter confirming your current membership in the SCS (or promise to join upon the panel’s acceptance by the SCS). All abstracts will be judged anonymously and so should not reveal the author’s name, but the email should provide name, abstract title, and affiliation. Abstracts should be 500 words or fewer and should follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/guidelines-authors-abstracts), except that works cited (not part of the 500-word limit) should be put at the end of the document, not in a separate text box.