Lectures with Miguel John Versluys and Albert de Jong

Persianism in Commagene: The Mnemohistory of the Achaemenid Empire in Hellenistic Eurasia

Miguel John Versluys (University of Leiden / Getty Villa Scholar)
The socio-political and cultural memory of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire played a very important role already in Antiquity. Miguel John Versluys has proposed to call this phenomenon, that is, the impact of Achaemenid Persia on the antique world, Persianism. In his lecture, Versluys will elaborate on this concept (and its discontents) by discussing the famous late Hellenistic site of Nemrud Dağ in the kingdom of Commagene, which was bordered on the east by the Euphrates river.

About the Speaker

Miguel John Versluys is professor of Classical and Mediterranean archaeology at Leiden University. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Leiden University in 2001 for a study of images of Egypt in Roman visual material culture and, in broader terms, the meaning of Aegyptiaca Romana. His research and teaching explore the cultural dynamics of the Hellenistic-Roman world (roughly 200 BC – AD 200) from the point of view of Eurasia. He investigates these dynamic processes from local, regional and global perspectives and by means of a variety of methodologies and techniques derived from the Social Sciences & Humanities as well as the Natural Sciences. Currently, Versluys is heading the NWO-funded VICI project Innovating objects. He is one of the editors of the Brill series Religions in the Graeco-Roman World.

The Study of Zoroastrianism and the Academic Study of Religion

Albert de Jong (University of Leiden / Getty Villa Scholar)
Even though the study of Zoroastrianism was an important subject in the early years of the History of Religions as a new discipline, it has slowly faded out of the conscience of all but a handful of specialists. This has been neither good for the study of Zoroastrianism, nor for the academic study of religion in general. This lecture will attempt to reconstruct what happened and sketch a way towards a better future for both fields.

About the Speaker

Albert de Jong is Professor of the Study of Religion in the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. He studied Theology and Persian (cum laude) in Utrecht from 1984 to 1990, and Old and Middle Iranian languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London from 1990 to 1991. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht in 1996 with a dissertation on Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin literature. For this work, he was awarded a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which he held from 1996 to 1997. Upon his return to the Netherlands, he started a post-doctoral project funded by the Netherlands Science Organization on the internal diversity of Zoroastrianism at the Faculty of Theology of Leiden University, which he gave up in 1998 for a lectureship in the study of religion in Leiden. In 2008, he was appointed Professor of Study of Religion in that same university. He is currently finishing a small book in French on the general history of Zoroastrianism and a two-volume publication on Parthian Zoroastrianism based on the academic Nachlass of Professor Mary Boyce.

Advanced registration is requested and seating is limited.
For more information and to RSVP: info@pourdavoud.ucla.edu