@alexcushing.bsky.social
Roman Social Historian @ University of Rochester; epigraphy, enslavement, the formerly enslaved, and labour in the ancient Mediterranean.
AMERICA!
The new and final episode of โPompeii The New Digโ airs tonight on PBS!
It follows the progress of the excavation team and all the spectacular and poignant discoveries made in the last year. Itโs a beautiful love letter to Pompeii.
www.pbs.org/video/traile...
Itโs out! This paper explores how the naval ram was more than just a weapon, it was a cultural symbol woven into almost every part of ancient Greek and Roman life. Of course, not every ram โportrayal" is fully explored, leaving plenty more to research and discover!
jaha.org.ro/index.php/JA...
My article "Jewish Interconnectivity and Diasporic Unrest under Trajan" is out in the Journal of Ancient Judaism!
Check it out if you're interested in transregional relationships between Jews between North Africa & West Asia. DM if you don't have institutional access!
brill.com/view/journal...
My conversation with @chancebonar.bsky.social on his chapter (Manumission) from the book Ancient Slavery and Its New Testament Contexts is available now for $5 a month on Patreon! Thanks to @eerdmansbooks.bsky.social for the review copy.
28.07.2025 14:01 โ ๐ 6 ๐ 5 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
The International Congress of Papyrology takes place next week in ๐ฉ๐ช.
Usama Ali Gad and I are papyrologists but we have decided that we could not in our good conscience attend. In this post, we explainwhy we have decided to boycott this yrโs congress
everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2025/07/26/g...
Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCEโ300 CE | Oxford Academic
academic.oup.com/book/60683
A stone inscription in Latin whose first line reads A Caedicius Successus. Subsequent lines are too small to read. Tomb inscription of A(ulus) Caedicius Successus, quinquennalis (president) of the guild of skippers sailing the Adriatic Sea.
Today on the blog, SN Yeager and Victoria Austen discuss Classics and unionization for the Contingent Faculty series.
www.classicalstudies.org/scs-blog/sn-...
After announcing it at the Classical Association Conference over the weekend, today we launch our Working Classicists Guide to Event Accessibility.
In it, we suggest ways to equalise access and eliminate anxieties around event attendance.
Read more: www.workingclassicists.com/zine/working...
The @socstudyofthepast.bsky.social now has a YouTube channel, and if you would like to catch up on our event on Friday, โArchaeology and Apartheidโ, you can do so here: m.youtube.com/channel/UCVI...
07.07.2025 21:28 โ ๐ 31 ๐ 11 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 3
Mathura stands at the foot of a set of steps leading up to the porch of an imposing building behind her. The building is a mix of architectural styles, with columns and porch adorning the set of stairs. The brick appears to be painted in an orange-brown colour, with white details.
Is it possible to re-envision the place of Greece and Rome in the ancient world overall? In todayโs new #PeoplingPodcast, we are joined by Dr. Mathura Umachandran to reimagine Classics through the lens of Critical Ancient World Studies (CAWS) /1 peoplingthepast.com/2025/07/01/p...
01.07.2025 13:19 โ ๐ 16 ๐ 9 ๐ฌ 1 ๐ 5
The Working Classicists Awards 2025
โโก๐
Working Classicists Awards 2025
โโก๐
It's time to announce the winners of #WCA2025!
Our six categories this year:
๐จCreative Classicist
๐ฆธUnsung Classicist
๐งโ๐ซEducator Classicist
๐คCommunity Classicist
๐ฑNewcomer Classicist
and
โญWorking Classicist of the Year
And our winners are...
Here's how you can help preserve the historical information now on display at our National Parks.
1. Visit a National Park.
2. Take photos of any signage, including markers and monuments.
3. Upload those images to the #SaveOurSigns archive.
The transcript and podcast for my interview for the @jacobinmag.bsky.social is out now. It is on Roman labor and collective action. Although, again, I still donโt think Romans had a โclass struggleโ in the purely Marxist senseโbut definitely in terms of social orders. jacobin.com/2025/07/anci...
03.07.2025 11:50 โ ๐ 48 ๐ 9 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 2
Cambridge Core webpage for an article titled "Disability in Antiquity".
Glad to see Debby Sneed's, Cecily Bateman's and I's co-authored Subject Profile on Disability in Antiquity for The Classical Review being published online and #OpenAccess today by Cambridge University Press.
You can read the full article via the following link: doi.org/10.1017/S000...
This sounds great - Iโd definitely be down for taking part in this.
02.07.2025 12:35 โ ๐ 1 ๐ 0 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0Delighted to see this up online, *with* the cover image:
global.oup.com/academic/pro...
If you ever doubt that propaganda and demonization of enemies as sub human is effective, just remember that some people will still be falling for it 2000 years later
25.06.2025 12:19 โ ๐ 798 ๐ 116 ๐ฌ 17 ๐ 2
The book cover for _God, Slavery, and Early Christianity_ is out!
The image is a bilingual inscription of a manumitted vicaria (an enslaved person of an enslaved person): Hygeia, enslaved by Calyx, enslaved by the deified Augustus
Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE-300 CE Edited by Jeremiah Coogan, Candida R. Moss, and Joseph A. Howley Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean Description This volume assembles twenty-two scholars from the fields of classics and early Christian studies to interrogate the intersections between writing and enslavement around the Roman Mediterranean. Drawing upon methods developed in scholarship on book history and Atlantic slavery, the authors demonstrate the myriad ways in which the material and intellectual contributions of enslaved literary workers were vital to the composition, editing, copying, circulation, reading, and preservation of Roman texts.
Wanted to note that our edited volume _Writing, Enslavement, and Power in the Roman Mediterranean, 100 BCE-300 CE_ edited by @jeremiahcoogan.bsky.social, @candidamoss.bsky.social, & @illdottore.bsky.social is now available for OUP pre-order & will be out September 2025 global.oup.com/academic/pro...
19.06.2025 21:39 โ ๐ 79 ๐ 18 ๐ฌ 2 ๐ 0This parade will cost at least the equivalent of 180 years worth of an NIH biomedical research grant.
07.06.2025 22:23 โ ๐ 1395 ๐ 549 ๐ฌ 45 ๐ 16
A bad President, for instance, has the power to do what? What can he not do? If he wanted to revolutionize this government, he could easily do it with this ponderous power; it would be an auxiliary power. He could cry โhavoc, and let slip the dogs of war,โ29 and say to the conspirators: โI am with you. If you succeed, all is well. If you fail, I will interpose the shield of my pardon, and you are safe. If your property is taken away from you by Congress, I will pardon and restore your property. Go on and revolutionize the government; I will stand by you.โ The bad man will say or might say this. I am not sure but we have got a man now who comes very near saying it. Let us have done with this pardoning power. We have had enough of this. Pardoning! How inexpressibly base have been the uses made by this powerโthis beneficent power. It has been that with which a treacherous President has trafficked. He has made it the means of securing adherents to himself instead of securing allegiance to the government.
very fun to read frederick douglass accurately describe the problem with the pardon power in 1867
05.06.2025 11:56 โ ๐ 17012 ๐ 4808 ๐ฌ 276 ๐ 269
A set of nine unevenly shaped biscuits arranged in a glass-lidded box. Each biscuit is curved and made to look like a fragent of ancient pottery. The base icing is in shades of orange, peach, and cream. Figures, swirls, repeating leaf patterns, and horses are painted onto the icing surface in black. The biscuits are aged with scratch marks and cracks.
Things are about to get a bit ancient.
I baked these biscuity sherds on a hemisphere cake tin in an attempt to recreate Ancient Greek pottery fragments in all three dimensions. The originals, dating from c.1600-435 BCE, can be found in the collections of the Ashmolean Museum.
Ms.Rachel is showing more humanity than our politicians
21.05.2025 18:06 โ ๐ 4325 ๐ 1100 ๐ฌ 45 ๐ 130OPEN-SOURCE TEXTBOOK ALERT
A student stumbled upon some open-source resources out of the University of British Columbia and they're really stellar! Check these out!
1. "UnRoman Romans," a sourcebook on marginalized groups in ancient Rome (ed. Siobhรกn McElduff)
pressbooks.bccampus.ca/unromantest/
๐จ @gmandreou.bsky.social launched a fundraiser to help 12 Gazan students who worked on the GAZAMAP project pay their tuition fees. We at EO are fully behind this initiative, so we invited her to share it on the platform. Please donate!๐ everydayorientalism.wordpress.com/2025/05/19/h...
19.05.2025 06:57 โ ๐ 15 ๐ 17 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 5Today's action is the single largest mass-illegalization event in US history.
350,000 people woke up this morning with legal status, living and working here with official permission. They'll go to bed as undocumented immigrants facing deportation.
Generative Al Statement: The goal of this course is to help you improve as thinkers, scholars, and community members. The use of generative Al and LLMs (including Chat GPT) is antithetical to these goals. I strongly encourage you not to use generative Al to complete readings or assignments. There is growing evidence that the use of generative Al facilitates labor exploitation of workers in the Global South, causes severe local and global environmental damage, relies on stolen labor of writers and artists, fails to provide accurate information or citations, and may be causing a microgeneration of students to struggle to think/write critically and become less employable after college. Beyond all of these, generative Al-written papers are (more often than not) poorly argued, woodenly and generically written, and obvious to humanities professors. This course aims to help us practice the acts of critical thinking, analyzing, discussing, producing knowledge, and engaging with the communities in which we live. Accordingly, I ask that you embrace the difficulty of that process rather than attempt to outsource these skills. At the same time, I am not interested in attempting to surveil you through Al-detection software because this creates a hostile classroom environment between students and their professor. College is a time for you to decide who you want to be and how you want to engage the work set before you.
Draft of an AI statement for future syllabi (building on what others have done & shared)
15.05.2025 02:07 โ ๐ 135 ๐ 27 ๐ฌ 13 ๐ 6
Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last weekโthe National Digital Newspaper Programโwhich builds Chronicling Americaโhas been shut down
Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general publicโfor genealogy, local historyโitโs such a loss
