CFP: ‘Addressing Dress: Clothing in the Ancient World’

Seen on Classicists (please send any responses to the folks mentioned in the quoted text, not to rogueclassicism!):

‘Addressing Dress: Clothing in the Ancient World’
Chairs: Glenys Davies, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Ursula Rothe (Edinburgh)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Papers are invited for the session entitled Addressing Dress: Clothing in the Ancient World at the forthcoming Celtic Conference in Classics (University of Edinburgh, 28th-31st July 2010). In recent years, Classics at Edinburgh has become a centre for dress studies with several staff members and postgraduate students working in the field and producing a number of new studies exploring the topic from a variety of angles (e.g. D. Cairns, ‘Anger and the veil in ancient Greek culture’, Greece & Rome 48, 2001; L. Llewellyn-Jones ed., Women’s Dress in the Ancient Greek World, 2002; L. Cleland/M. Harlow/L. Llewellyn-Jones eds, The Clothed Body in the Ancient World, 2005; L. Cleland/G. Davies/L. Llewellyn-Jones eds, Greek & Roman Dress from A-Z, 2007; U. Rothe, Dress & Cultural Identity in the Rhine-Moselle Region of the Roman Empire, 2009).

The session aims to contribute to exciting new developments in dress-related research in Classics by bringing together scholars from a wide range of fields, historical periods and places in the hope of engendering debate and comparison across these lines. As such, we welcome contributions from both text- and material culture-based researchers working on any aspect of dress in

• ancient and classical Egypt
• the ancient Near East
• ancient Greece
• the Roman Empire (Republic/Principate)
• Byzantium & late antiquity in general

We are also keen to inspire discussion on approaches to dress in the ancient period and hope to address some of the methodological problems inherent in trying to piece together ancient dress practices and their meanings from such a fragmentary source base.

We envisage papers on a wide range of subjects from class, status and gender to ethnicity and cultural identity as well as considerations of links between dress and political institutions or roles, all forms of resistance, and the role of dress in ancient literature. Papers could address very specific topics, such as the use and meaning of a particular garment or the role of dress in a particular classical work, or discuss broader phenomena by looking at wider patterns of social behaviour and their links to dress.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted as an email attachment to Ursula Rothe (ursula.rothe AT ed.ac.uk) by the 31st March 2010.