Presenters

The acanthus plant has arguably been one of the most widely used natural motifs in world history – and yet it remains widely unrecognized and unquestioned. Synonymous with the Classical era, its use has persisted through Neo-Classical and Baroque architectural styles and continues to evoke ideas of power and stability. Augustus and later emperors utilized the Corinthian capital and the acanthus motif as means of propaganda. This project argues that through empire-wide standardization and an emphasized association to imperial iconography, the acanthus plant was purposefully used to influence social and cultural sentiments in the Roman world by taking advantage of commonly shared concepts of flora in the ancient Mediterranean. One example of acanthus’s advantageous polysemy is its deep connections to Apollo – Augustus’s patron god – and its connections to numerous other religious figures and deities, such as Osiris. Whether it was the Garden of Eden and the Oak of Mamre in Abrahamic religions or the Cosmic Tree and the Acanthus Temple of Osiris in Egypt, gardens and flora were exceptionally important in the ancient world. As the distinct architectural identity of places such as Petra faded into Rome’s status-quo, the shift away from local ornament traditions to their standardized Roman counterparts indicate some level of regulation and driving force of change. Roman historians such as Pliny the Elder emphasized the importance of gardens to the Roman identity, and given the careful detail that Augustus and his successors allotted to their public image, the widespread use and standardization of the acanthus motif demonstrate its role in the empire as a well planned and important medium of propaganda. 

This presentation zooms in on the effects of tourism in ancient Delphi. I will start by explaining what Delphi is and how its citizens lived, using both textual and archaeological evidence. After a background is established, I will look at a specific inscription from Delphi titled "Tarif de Poissons" or, the Fish List. Examining this inscription shows how tourism led to high inflation in food prices in Delphi and how this was regulated by local authorities to ensure exploitation of pilgrims did not run too rampant. I will conclude by offering a comparison to modern Canadian tourist sites such as Banff or Jasper to illustrate how high, short term traffic in hard-to-reach areas results in an altered economy. 

This project positions garbology, the study of trash, as an emerging research approach in Classical archaeology, and as a framework for engaging with contemporary issues of sustainability. Although garbology began as a modern anthropological practice, its methods and insights have growing relevance for the study of the ancient world. By focusing on purposely discarded materials, archaeologists can reconstruct aspects of daily life, consumption, and social behavior that are often absent from textual or monumental records.

Furthermore, it investigates how garbological methods can be adapted to Classical contexts, examining both the practical and theoretical challenges that arise in interpreting ancient refuse. Key issues include preservation biases, site formation processes, and the ethical implications of studying waste as a form of human expression. Through comparative analysis of Greco-Roman case studies, the project evaluates how material discard patterns inform broader general understanding of economy, identity, and environmental interaction.

This study also situates garbology within a modern discourse on sustainability, proposing that archaeological perspectives on waste can offer critical insights into current debates surrounding consumption and environmental responsibility. By combining archaeology with sustainability research, this project demonstrates that the study of what societies discard can yield valuable data about cultural values, ecological practices, and the long term consequences of human material activity.

The narratives that mobilized and justified the demolition of the Babri Masjid grounded their claims to “historical” truth in the recasting of mythic memory as historical fact. Drawing on the mythological belief that the god Ram was born in Ayodhya (and the rumour that there existed a temple dedicated to Ram toppled by Muslim imperialists) the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asserted that the Babri Masjid was the site of Ram’s birthplace. This assertion was taken to be credible by the many Hindus across the country who understood the BJP’s moral imperative and stormed the mosque. By under guarding their “historical” claims of truth with narrative details associated with a mythic-moral truth they played on two distinct notions of truth: fusing propositional, historical and verifiable notions of truth with metaphoric faith-based notions of truth. This political moment highlights how fraught the relationship between myth and history is in postcolonial India. Framed as an illegitimate means of accessing the past by the colonial enterprise, myth finds its force by being co-opted into historical language.

In exploring the alienation of myth in public discourses of the past this paper analyzes why and how myth has become an illegitimate means of engaging with the past. This is accomplished by distinguishing myth from history, exploring history’s Enlightenment context, as well as engaging with the impact of the colonial encounter and linking discourses of lack and secularity in the construction of the Indian nation-state. In doing so, the paper argues that the failure to view myth as a legitimate means of engaging with the past is a result of history’s absolutizing nature and an effect of this sense of lack. 

Tibetan Buddhist philosophical debates are characterized by their rigorous and detailed analyses of wide-ranging subject matter, including doctrinal hermeneutics, metaphysics, practical soteriology, and, most important in our case, ethics. In this paper, I will discuss the opposing positions of Tsongkhapa and Gendun Chöpel regarding the relationship between the Madhyamika doctrine of emptiness (i.e., being empty of svabhava) and conventional reality, with particular emphasis on its implications for the possibility of ethical discernment and action at the level of enlightened cognition in relation to the Buddhist understanding of compassion. I argue that Gilles Deleuze’s ontology and transcendental genetic method can provide a model for ethical discernment and action at the level of enlightened cognition that accounts for Chöpel’s valid criticism of Tsongkhapa. I develop this thesis in four broad steps. First, I provide a brief overview of the centrality of compassion and ethics in Tibetan Buddhist thought to set up the stakes of this debate. Second, I analyze Tsongkhapa’s account of the equivalence of emptiness, i.e., ultimate reality, and conventional reality and its role in grounding his ethical vision. Third, I elucidate Gendun Chöpel’s critique of Tsongkhapa’s account of conventional existence and show how, although valid, it nevertheless remains incomplete insofar as it raises problems for ethical discernment and action, potentially endangering Buddhist understandings of compassion. Finally, I show how Deleuze’s ontology provides a model for ethical discernment and action that represents a potential case of solution to the key points of Chöpel’s critique. 

By the age of thirty-two, M.N. Roy had travelled to six countries, founded the Mexican and Indian Communist Party, and participated in multiple nationalist armed resistances. Yet, his and the history of his Party barely appear in mainstream modern South Asian historical narratives. Even when it does appear in highly specialized works, it is largely discussed in relation to the events and actors of the independence movement in colonial India in the early twentieth century. It is almost as if the significance of Roy, his Party, and his compatriots solely depended on their interaction with the independence movement in India and the Indian National Congress. Broadly speaking, South Asian historiography has ascribed little value to him and his Party independent of the national-liberation movement.

My honors thesis aims to challenge this trend by studying the history of the Communist Party of India (CPI) and M.N Roy from a transnational and trans-colonial perspective. This essay will argue that most of the scholarly work until very recently has attempted to analyze and discuss the history of the Party from a nationalist framework. This has left several gaps in the historiography of the subject matter. Firstly, these works lack a nuanced narrative of the history of the CPI in itself and its activities and evolution in colonial India. Secondly, these works often have a bipolar portrayal of M.N Roy, either as an 'outcast' or a 'misunderstood hero.' Lastly, previous works have also tended to conflate the history of the CPI with the history of Roy, subsequently ignoring the influence of other party members, especially women.

To address these gaps, my thesis will attempt to construct a more balanced narrative of the history of the CPI in colonial India till 1947. I will do so by studying the influence of M.N Roy both within and beyond the colony-metropole dichotomy and decentralize his figure to some extent by studying the roles of other members in the Party, such as his spouse, Evelyn Trent Roy. I will use a transnational and trans-colonial lens to fill in the gaps and offer this lens as an alternative to the nationalist framework that continues to dominate mainstream South Asian historiography.

This essay will start with a brief discussion of the history and contemporary circumstances of the Communist Party of India and a brief biography of M.N Roy to provide some background. It will then discuss the trends of scholarly works on this topic in three broad categories. These categories are Western Scholarly Narratives (1950-1970), South Asian Counter-Narratives (1970-1990) and Contemporary Narratives (1990-Present) respectively. Following this discussion, it will consider the transnational and trans-colonial lenses as an alternative historiographical framework to nationalist historiographical lenses. Lastly, it will explore how these alternative frameworks can address the aforementioned gaps. 

Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers during the English Revolution (1642-1651), has often been characterized as radical when it came to economic considerations, yet conservative in his conceptualization of the family and women in his utopia. Building on Christopher Hill’s argument that the English Revolution was a social revolution that allowed revolutionaries to think differently about what was to come, this paper argues that the revolution also provided Winstanley and others with the opportunity to think differently about the family. First, this paper examines the intersection between Winstanley's concept of the store-house and how the family would reproduce itself in his envisioned society. Next, his proposition for managing families based on an officer system is discussed to show his novel idea of power. Finally, this paper investigates Winstanley’s comments on gender relations and the equality of women. Through the exploration of these three aspects of Winstanley’s thought, this paper shows that Winstanley did imagine a different type of family and gender relations, which were built upon his fundamental insight that freedom lay in common access to the land. 

El Escorial de San Lorenzo Real, built in the late sixteenth century by the Spanish Habsburg King Philip II, is one of the most influential buildings in early modern Spanish history. Built during a rising wave of Protestantism across Europe, many historians see this building as a monument to Catholicism and the Counter-Reformation, diligently adhering to the iconographic strictures of the Council of Trent. Architect Juan de Herrera created an entirely new style, estilo desornamentado, or “unornamented style,” representing a fundamental break from the Italian and Flemish traditions that informed much of Spanish architecture, and which influenced the architecture of Spain for centuries to come. A site of architectural as well as artistic revolution, it brought together painters from all across Spain and Italy to work on its decoration. With them came a new flow of ideas and a shifting perspective on art itself, as well as new traditions of high altar decoration previously unseen in Spain. El Escorial is highly unusual for being completed and decorated entirely during its patron’s lifetime, unlike most other great works of architecture, to which decorations were added slowly over many years. Also very unusually, Philip II spent a great deal of time in El Escorial, especially in the later years of his life, and did much of his governmental work from its king’s quarters. In light of this, the basilica’s heavily ideological and propagandistic decoration provides an exclusive glimpse into the politics and religious beliefs of Philip II. My research examines primary sources surrounding El Escorial’s construction and secondary source analyses of the building and its art from a variety of perspectives, including art historians, architectural historians, and political and economic historians. To construct my argument, I draw a fundamental proposition from historian Magdalena S Sánchez: in early modern Spain, there was no discernible difference between the political, private, religious, or familial spheres of life. In light of this, I argue that El Escorial stands as not only a monument to Spanish Catholicism but also as an argument for the political power and influence of Philip II, a man desperately trying to live up to the vast legacy of his father, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. By examining the intersections of the religious, political, and Habsburg dynastic subtleties in El Escorial, I construct a more complete picture of the building, the man who made and used it, and the Spain that made and used him. 

From its foundation in 1806 to its victorious participation in the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the Duchy of Nassau (1806-1866) had been continuously at war. Nassau had been compelled by its allies to provide disproportionately large contingents of soldiers, which in turn drained the ducal treasury. But despite these privations of war, much attention was paid by the Ducal War Ministry to matters of uniform. In nine years of constant war, no less than four sets of uniform regulations significantly transformed the appearance of the Nassau military. Through an analysis of archival material, contemporary illustrations, extant material culture, and theoretical reconstructions of uniform items, this paper argues that the changes in uniform of the Nassau military were not necessarily financially motivated. Instead, changes in uniform reflected both changing political affiliations and a struggle for agency, allowing the Duchy to negotiate its own identity in spite of its continued subordination to changing "great powers". The Duchy of Nassau serves as a microcosm of these processes which helped shape the post-Congress of Vienna world, and as a prime example of how military identity helps shape the nation-building endeavour. 

The beginning of the twentieth century was a time of significant change in the province of Alberta. In addition to its separation from the North-West Territories in 1905, the region had experienced a large wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. During the First World War, women (though not all of them) obtained the right to vote and the province began to experiment with direct legislation, leading to the adoption of Prohibition from 1916 to 1924. Furthermore, the legal and social place of women was evolving throughout this period, but these changing ideas around gender did not improve the lives of all women. One such woman was Florence Lassandro, a young Italian immigrant, who became the only woman in Alberta to receive the death penalty in May of 1923. This work seeks to analyse what the legal case of Lassandro reveals about gender roles and double standards towards immigrants in Alberta, primarily through newspaper articles from the era. Unfortunately, the existing sources can only reveal how she was perceived by (some of) those around her, and not how she thought or felt. The first section of this article covers Albertan society’s perspective on women and immigrants, as well as how they affected Lassandro. The second deals with women and justice, particularly in the context of first wave feminism. The final section analyses the double standard in Lassandro’s verdict.

Propertius, whose first book of elegies dates to approximately 29 CE, wrote amidst emerging gender tensions in Rome. His writing recalls readers to the Augustan Age (43 BCE to 18 CE), a time in which upper-class women like the emperor Augustus’ wife Livia Drusilla embodied increasingly authoritative roles. Propertius’ literary representations of witches mirror the active socio-political roles of such women. I will use Prop. 1.1 as a case study, while also comparing the witches in this poem to other Greco-Roman literary witches (Acanthis, Medea, and the unnamed witches of Hippoc. Morb sacr. and Ar. Nub.) to demonstrate how such witches broadly reflect how men in Augustan Rome viewed actional women with contempt. From the witches’ foreignness to their drawing down of the moon, ancient witchcraft signifies an engagement in unnatural, socially perverse activity.

Specifically, the witches in Prop. 1.1 are meddlesome figures who the amator calls upon only when magical “trickeries” (19) seem the only way to reclaim the puella Cynthia’s love. The amator’s references to these women’s uncanny ability to alter both the natural world and human minds (17-21) emphasize their active, commanding presence. This paper analyzes how the witches in Prop. 1.1 recall Augustan gender tensions by considering the amator’s descriptions of these women alongside Livia’s public roles, Augustus’ gender ideology, Latin witch tropes, and definitions of Greco-Roman magic. I argue that the “trickeries” (19) of the witches in Prop. 1.1 allude to the suspicion and distaste with which Roman men regarded the expanding political influence of women in the Augustan Age. These women, like the witches, threatened the phallogocentric social and political order of Rome, which appears natural only insofar as it frames those who diverge from gender expectations as perverted. 

Female homosexuality in Ancient Rome is a topic with minimal sources that has long been understudied in Classics. The assumption has been that it was viewed with varying degrees of disgust and disdain in Roman culture, with it being outright decried in sources like Martial and Phaedrus, whereas sources like Ovid take a more sympathetic, yet still negative, approach, portraying female homosexual relationships as a misbegotten and unnatural form of love. However this is not the full picture according to archaeological evidence, specifically CIL 4.5296 found in Pompeii. This inscription is of a poem, this alone would be unusual, though not unattested, in Pompeian graffiti. However CIL 4.5296 is entirely unique in that it is a love poem, seemingly written by a woman to another woman, which is unattested in Latin literature. This poem, I argue, dramatically changes how we view female homosexuality, from something entirely negative and decried in Roman sources, to something that, while still clearly looked at with disdain and disgust, was to a degree accepted in Roman culture. My research utilizes a variety of primary and secondary sources to establish the currently accepted academic view on Roman female homosexuality before undergoing a close analysis of CIL 4.5296, bringing in academic sources specifically from Kristina Miller, Sarah Levin-Richardson, and Luca Graverini to establish how CIL changes how we understand the Roman views on female homosexuality. 

The significance of nymphs as venerated figures is widely attested across the Ancient Greek world. They were deeply tied to the mythological roots of many communities, and found homes in numerous cult sites as the recipients of worship. However, common current-day conceptions of nymph worship are often highly generalized, characterizing worshipers almost exclusively as rural girls and young women concerned with rites of passage. This paper scrutinizes these dominant assumptions against archaeological evidence, which serves as concrete testimony to the lived realities of worshipers. A variety of sites are used to illustrate nymph cult’s significant capacity for wider appeal and variation in service of the needs of the local community. Detailed analyses of the Zar Trypa Cave in Thessaly, the Vari Cave in Attica, and a number of sites in Corinth are discussed in depth, alongside broader analyses of data from across larger regions. 

In the Ancient Greek world, divination was a widespread and commonly understood practice. It was not limited to only the elite, nor a belief only of the masses, as people from all walks of life would use different methods to further their knowledge about the past, present, or future through the means of soliciting divine attention. 

Through comparative analysis, I survey methods ranging from individual cleromancy (divination via lot drawing or rolling dice) to professional oracles to determine how and when each method would be used, and how these methods were perceived. By examining archaeological materials found at various confirmed oracular activity sites, such as the temple of Apollo at Delphi, analyzing literary evidence of the nature of various roles of seer, such as the purpose and role of a War Seer, and studying extant remains of magic spells, I will look at the various factors people utilized to determine which form of divination best suited their socio-economic position and the advice which they sought from the gods.

Through this, I have determined that the main factors determining which of the wide options available one would choose come down to availability, social stigma, trust-worthiness, and price. By understanding these factors, we can come to better understand the Greek world as a whole, as well as the perceived range of importance of different questions. Additionally, this allows me to look slightly outside of the scope of only the elite man, as many of the methods associated more with magic would have likely been less frequented by the elite, and more by those who were unable to afford other methods, giving us a glimpse into the average citizen's experience. 

The exact provenance of the Corpus Hermeticum is still the subject of much debate. Emerging from the highly syncretic milieu of Hellenistic Egypt in the 2nd century CE, the Hermetica follows most directly from the Neoplatonic school but echoes many other preceding philosophical and religious traditions. This paper is concerned with exploring possible influences on Hermetic cosmogony outlined in libellus I of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres, with particular focus on its striking parallels to the sequence of creation outlined in the first book of Genesis, contrasted with Platonic metaphysics drawn from Plato's Timaeus. Through a comparative analysis of these three texts in parallel, I establish that, while staying true to its Platonic heritage in the mechanics and characteristics of God as Demiourgos, — contrasted with the Old Testament's God as Kyrios, — the Poimandres departs notably in the sequence of creation to closely resemble the first book of Genesis, down to the mirroring of precise phrasing.

My interpretation challenges the assertion of Sir Walter Scott, first scholar to publish an English translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (1925) alongside extensive notes on his translations and a comprehensive history of Corp. manuscripts. Scott is firm that there was little to no Jewish or early Christian contribution to the cosmology of the Hermetica, but I suggest that the parallels between the Poimandres and Genesis are too strong for there to have been no connection at all.