Kalamazoo College’s Department of Classics will host the co-director of a digital archaeology project, known as the Mediterranean Connectivity Initiative, for a public lecture this Thursday. 

Lindsey Mazurek is an assistant professor of classical studies at Indiana University Bloomington. Her lecture is titled Imagining a Greek Home for an Egyptian Goddess: Time, Landscape and Architecture in Greek Sanctuaries to Isis. The talk will address Isis’ arrival on Greek shores in the third century BCE, and how her new followers had to build sanctuaries appropriate for an Egyptian goddess.  

Mazurek commonly explores ethnicity, religion, landscape and change in the Roman provinces, especially how the inhabitants of Rome’s provinces reconfigured their own ideas of themselves and their world in response to Roman rule. Her book, Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity Through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2022), examines the worship of Egyptian deities such as Isis, Sarapis and Anubis in Greece during the Roman period and how local devotees reconfigured traditional ideas about Greekness in response to their religious practices. 

Mazurek’s digital archaeology project uses social network analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping to study how ancient social networks were created over time and space in the Roman Empire. Her research has been recognized through awards and fellowships from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the German Archaeological Institute and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The classics lecture will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Olds Upton Room 103. For more information on the presentation, visit the Department of Classics website.