Rome and the Colonial City
In partnership with the British School at Rome and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome.
The aim of this conference is neither to celebrate the grid city, nor to celebrate the influence of an ancient model on modern urbanism, but to question and contextualise it. This three day conference pulls together specialists on antiquity, the middle ages and the modern period to question some of the “colonialist” assumptions in the literature, and to look at the changing ways in which antiquity has influenced modern urbanism.
The first day will focus on theoretical writings about the city in the colonial context; the second looks at colonial foundation as a process of experimentation with urban models; the third looks at the ideological underpinnings of the grid, its use whether for egalitarian ideals or social control.
Days 1 and 2 will be held at the British School at Rome Lecture Theatre
Day 3 will be held at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR)
For access to the full programme and registration, visit our website: https://impanccit.wixsite.com/impanccit/events
Cities as palimpsests? Urban evolutions in the Eastern Mediterranean
The tangible traces of the Greco-Roman city were made meaningful through diverse ways of reflecting on the past, many of which diverge widely from modern modes of identification and signification. For this reason, the conference will open by considering the urban imagination in four broad cultural spheres that have animated the Eastern Mediterranean over time: Arabic, Byzantine, Frankish and Ottoman. It will then conclude with a session primarily concerned with the re-invention of the past and its various uses in the early modern and contemporary periods.
This three-day workshop will be held from Wednesday 8 May to Friday 10 May at Bahçeşehir University, Beşiktaş Campus, Istanbul. For access to the full programme and registration, please visit our website here.
Cities and Citizenship after Rome
In the ancient world, citizenship implied both political and physical membership of specific cities. This model came under pressure in Late Antiquity with the universalisation of Roman citizenship under Caracalla, the spread of Christianity, and eventually the end of the Roman Empire in the west. This took place alongside a physical transformation of the ancient city. It has long been assumed that these changes brought an end to old Roman ideas of citizenship. This workshop addresses how ancient concepts of citizenship and the city adapted and changed to the new world of the Early Middle Ages. These questions will be addressed through a series of papers that stretch from the ancient to the medieval world. In doing so, this workshop aims to complicate narratives about the legacy of the Roman city and the development of ideas of citizenship in the medieval world.
This one-day workshop will be held on Friday October 5th in the Eastwood Room of the Postdoc Centre, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge. For access to the full programme, click here.
Please arrive 09:00 for registration and the event will finish around 17:30.
Refreshments and light lunch included.
If you would like to attend the workshop or have any other queries please email Beth Clark at bc469@cam.ac.uk.
The Roman and Islamic City in North Africa
The Impact of the Ancient City project will hold its first workshop on Friday 29th September 2017. The project aims to assess the urban evolution of Greco-Roman cities that surround the Mediterranean. The first workshop will focus on North Africa and al-Andalus, where there will be discussions on recent work in Volubilis and the afterlife of the Roman city in North Africa and Southern Spain.
The workshop will be held at the McDonald Institute, consisting of six presentations between 9 a.m. and 6.30 p.m.. The full programme is available here.
Participants are asked to arrive by 9 a.m. for registration, ready for talks to begin at 9:15.
Tea, coffee and juice will be available throughout the day and there will be a one-hour lunch break during which sandwiches and snacks will be on offer. Please let us know if you plan to attend by Monday 25th September.
If you would like to attend the workshop or have any other queries please email Beth Clark at bc469@cam.ac.uk.