2024 Thomas Spencer Jerome Lecture Series

Presented by Rubina Raja
Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art Centre Director, Centre for Urban Network Evolutions

The 2024 Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures focus on the rich and complex urban cultures in the Roman and Late Antique Near East but also make excursions to earlier and later periods, including those of the Hellenistic and Early Islamic times.

Professor Raja will present four lectures and one seminar between March 18 and 25, 2024:

• Greek and Local Heritages in Urban Landscapes of the Near East: Cultural Amnesia versus the Longue Durée, Monday, March 18, 4:00-7:00 pm, Hussey Room, Michigan League

• A World of Local Cultures in a Roman Sea: The Rise of Urban Landscapes in the Near East, Wednesday, March 20, 4:00-7:00 pm, Vandenberg Room, Michigan League

• The Long Late Antiquity: From Cities to Villages and Back Again, Friday, March 22, 4-7 pm, Pendleton Room, Michigan Union

• Classical Studies Graduate Student Seminar: Digging Caesar’s Forum: Rome’s urban culture in a longue durée Perspective, Saturday, March 23, 11:00 am - 3:30 pm

• Appropriating the Roman Cities of the East: The Historiography of Archaeology, Monday, March 25, 3:30-6:30 pm, Hussey Room, Michigan League

The impressive remaining ruins of the cities of the ancient Near East — cities such as Aelia Capitolina (Jerusalem), Apamea, Baalbek (Heliopolis), Bostra, Caesarea Marittima, Jerash, and Palmyra — almost all date to the Roman period. This is no accident. The Roman empire was an ‘empire of cities’. In the western Mediterranean, where there were relatively few, the Romans planted an enormous number of new ones. The East, on the other hand, was already densely populated with cities. Here the ancient settlements of the Levant flourished under Roman rule, growing steadily in size and prosperity.

These cities gradually took on a new appearance too, as they each acquired a selection of the grand appurtenances and amenities of a Roman metropolis or model city: aqueducts, vaulted bath buildings, stone theaters, covered markets, colonnaded streets, monumental frontal temple buildings. In recent years these cities have attracted a fair amount of attention from archaeologists and historians; but they generally remain outside our accepted narratives of the evolving urban cultures of the Roman world.

The Jerome Thomas Spencer Lecture series revisits these long-established centers of the Roman Near East, and the various ancient peoples who inhabited them. The lectures will seek to trace, through the archaeology and historical sources, the transformation of these cities, from the late first century BCE until Late Antiquity and even into the Early Islamic period; and to describe the ways in which there emerged—here in the monumental spaces of these Levantine communities—a range of new and distinctive kinds of ‘urbanity’.

Urban development in the Roman period prompted a welter of political, social, and religious changes — all of which resulted in a number of different ‘regimes of urban living’, distinctive to the region. The lectures will take us through a series of extremely varied – but recognizable – urban landscapes: the Decapolis, the Limestone Massif and the Tetrapolis; the settlements along the Mediterranean coast; and places deep inland such as Palmyra in the Syrian Desert and the Hauran. But by the end of the journey, the lectures shall have situated these cities as physical manifestations of a local or regional experiment in ‘urban self-fashioning’ — as the peoples of the region, collectively and individually, availed themselves of the alluring opportunities of the Roman peace.

Rubina Raja is a Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Aarhus University, Denmark, and Centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Professor Raja studied classical archaeology at Oxford (M.St. and D.Phil) after undergraduate studies at the University of Copenhagen and Università di Roma, La Sapienza, Italy, and has worked during her studies at the Danish Ministry of Culture. After her DPhil, she held post-docs in Hamburg, Germany, and Aarhus, Denmark. She was an associate professor at Aarhus University between 2009 and 2012, and in 2012, she was appointed professor with special responsibilities. In 2015, she took up the professorial chair of Classical Art and Archaeology at Aarhus University as the first female professor in the field in Denmark ever. There, she has also since 2015 directed the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions. Raja has published widely on Greco-Roman portraiture, ancient religion, and its monuments, urban development from the Hellenistic to the Medieval periods in the Eastern Mediterranean, cultural heritage in conflict zones, and legacy data. She is known for her groundbreaking work on the Syrian oasis city Palmyra and her high-impact collaborative archaeological fieldwork in Jerash and Rome. She has received numerous international research awards and honors, including the Humboldt Foundation’s Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize, Queen Margrethe IIs Rome Prize, the Elite Research Prize, and the Silver Medal for outstanding research in the humanities and social sciences awarded by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, where she has been a member since 2015. She holds several leadership and management degrees from INSEAD, Paris, and Copenhagen Business School, among other institutions. She has mentored junior and senior scholars in career development programs, and is the author of numerous outreach features on the importance of the humanities broadly in today’s rapidly changing world – underlining in which ways Classics remain relevant in our day and age. In 2023, she was a visiting fellow at All Souls College at her Alma Mater institution, the University of Oxford.

Raja is an experienced field archaeologist, having headed projects in the Middle East and Italy since 2011. Her research focuses on urban and societal developments as well as networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods, iconography, and religion in Antiquity, with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean and Rome. She has pioneered research intersecting archaeology and natural sciences, bringing high-definition studies of the past to the forefront.