First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Fashioning Identities in Antiquity

(4 Credits)

Fashion is central to expressions of identity. In this course, you will be introduced to the social, political, and cultural stakes of fashion in the ancient Mediterranean world (inclusive of northern Africa and western Asia). In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will learn to critically analyze the art historical, archaeological, and literary evidence for fashion—including clothing, hair, cosmetics, and jewelry—to formulate evidence-based observations about ancient societies. Furthermore, we will encounter the ways that the "stuff" of fashion, like textiles, metals, and semi-precious stones, were central to trade and technological exchange across continents. By examining a range of case studies from Pharaonic Egypt to Imperial Roman Italy, Classical Greece to Late Antique Ethiopia, we will investigate how fashioning the body was central to the construction of identity, the discipline of society, the display of power, and the articulation of ideology.