Talks

An Epic Afternoon: The World of Homer Revealed

Dr. Kate Cooper is the inaugural Mirkopoulos Associate Curator of Ancient Greece & Rome and is responsible for ROM’s collections from the ancient Greek and Roman world which encompass a large area of the ancient Mediterranean over more than four millennia from the Bronze Age to the fall of the Byzantine empire. She also teaches courses about ancient Mediterranean history and material culture for the University of Toronto and University of Toronto Scarborough. 

Professor Dimitri Nakassis studies the material and textual production of early Greek communities, especially of the Mycenaean societies of Late Bronze Age Greece. His book, Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (Brill 2013), developed new methods for investigating individuals named in the administrative Linear B texts and argued from this evidence that Mycenaean society was far less hierarchical and much more dynamic than it had been considered in the past. He has published articles and book chapters on Homer and Hesiod, Greek religion and history, archaeological survey, Linear A, and the economy, society and prosopography of the Mycenaean world. He is currently writing a second book tentatively entitled "Mycenaean histories," which is a polemic against the traditional study of the Mycenaean palaces. He is co-director (with Sarah James and Scott Gallimore) of the Western Argolid Regional Project (WARP), a diachronic archaeological survey in southern Greece, and co-director (with Kevin Pluta) of the "Pylos Tablets Digital Project" project, which involves the digital documentation of all the administrative documents from the "Palace of Nestor" at Pylos. In 2015 he was named a MacArthur fellow. 

Artemis Georgiou is Assistant Research Professor at the Archaeological Research Unit of the University of Cyprus. She is the Principal Investigator of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Commercial Patterns Across the Sea’ (ComPAS), a European Research Council tarting Grant project with a budget of € 1,254,356. This project investigates interregional and intercultural connectivity in the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age eastern Mediterranean focussing on Cypriot trade vessels. Artemis earned her D.Phil at the University of Oxford and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including a Marie Skłodowska Curie Career Integration Grant, a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cyprus and the Edgar Peltenburg Fellowship at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI). An expert in the study of ancient material culture, particularly pottery, Artemis’ research integrates meticulous archaeological research with interdisciplinary methodologies to shed light on past communities and connect their stories to our shared heritage and make the narratives of the ancient world accessible to a broad audience. 

Sarah Murray is a cultural historian and archaeologist specializing in the material culture and institutions of early Greece, especially the history of exchange between the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean and social and economic developments in the Early Iron Age Aegean. She has worked on numerous archaeological projects in Greece and Italy and is currently co-directing an archaeological survey project around the bay of Porto Rafti in Eastern Attica (Greece), supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the University of Toronto’s Connaught New Researcher Award, and the Institute for the Study of Aegean Prehistory. Her publications relate to the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in Greece, and include articles on women’s roles in ceramic production in the Early Iron Age Aegean (American Journal of Archaeology, 2018, 2020) and the historiography of the Greek Dark Ages (in Hesperia, 2018), and two monographs, The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Trade, Imports, and Institutions, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, and Male Nudity in the Greek Iron Age: Representation and Ritual Context in Aegean Societies, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.