Dr Rebecca Flemming, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History and Fellow of Jesus College, has been appointed as a Joukowsky Lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) for 2020-21. Rebecca also recently featured on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time discussing the Justinianic Plague.
Two distinguished archaeologists are appointed annually as the Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lecturers. Pre-pandemic the lectures were delivered to twenty-seven local North American societies. The 2020-21 series is being delivered remotely.
Rebecca’s research interests include the social and cultural history of the Roman Empire, ancient medicine and the history of disease, women and gender issues in the ancient and modern worlds, and Roman religion. Her recent publications include Medicine and Markets: Essays on Ancient Medicine in Honour of Vivian Nutton, (ed. with Laurence Totelin, Classical Press of Wales, 2020) and Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, (ed. With Nick Hopwood and Lauren Kassell (Cambridge University Press, 2018), which features in the latest edition of Research Horizons.
Rebecca Fleming’s Joukowsky lectures are on the theme of Having Babies in Antiquity: Promotion, Planning and Intervention and Anatomy as Religion: The Body in Ancient Italian Votive practice.
Read more about the remaining lectures in the series.
For a recent publication on a similar theme see the open access preprint: ‘Fertility control in ancient Rome’, Women’s History Review 2020.
Rebecca discussed The Plague of Justinian on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time on 21 January 2021 with Melvyn Bragg, John Haldon, Professor of Byzantine History and Hellenic Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, and Greg Woolf, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London.