Jennifer Stager: And you: apotropaia and assemblage at Antioch
Religious Studies Department
Ho Center for Buddhist Studies
About the Event
The medium of mosaic makes visible its artistic assemblage, fitting together many different colors of cut stones and glass to forge images. During their excavation of ancient Antioch in the 1930s, excavators divided up many of the mosaic floors into fragments, lifted these from the ground, and dispersed them to different institutions, atomizing the corpus. Since 2020 the Antioch Recovery Project (ARP) has sought to digitally reassemble this corpus of mosaics. Several fragments among the corpus depict warding images, often labelled apotropaic, and include an inscription fitted together from stones that reads “And you!” This talk explores these apotropaic assemblages to ask how affect and facture intersect.
About the Speaker
Jennifer Stager, Professor of Art History, Johns Hopkins University
Jennifer Stager specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. Her areas of focus include theories of color and materiality, feminisms, multilingualism and cultural exchange, disability studies, ancient Greek and Roman medicine, performance, and classical receptions. Stager is Assistant Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University.
This event is part of Global Approaches to Sacred Space, which is generously funded as part of the SGS Global Research Workshop series with further support from The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies, the Department of Religious Studies, the Department of History, the Department of Classics, the Department of Art and Art History, the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Coorganized by Bissera V. Pentcheva, Maria Shevelkina, Emilia Cottignoli, & Maria Terss.