Fall 2026 – Spring 2027 lecture season
Stay informed about local events by becoming a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and selecting Western Massachusetts as your local society. For a complete list of Classics and Archaeology lectures in the Five Colleges, see the Amherst College Classics Lecture Schedule. All lectures are free and open to the public.
Jane Sancinito, “Evidence of Mobile Religious Practice from Roman Coins”
Tuesday, March 9, 2027
Amherst College
AIA National Lecture – William E. Metcalf Lecture in Numismatics
Abstract: Ancient temples appear regularly on Roman coins, celebrating the piety of the Roman populace and the generosity of republican and imperial builders. They offer invaluable evidence for structures that have been lost to time, but they tell us relatively little about ancient religion that we would not know from texts and surviving structures. A handful of coins, however, show a different, now-lost kind of worship-space: mobile temples and shrines that could be carried or lifted in processions or on pilgrimages. Ancient polytheistic religion was flexible and worshippers had access to multiple ways of honoring their gods. Still, it was usually expected that humans would travel to the gods, not the other way around. These coins suggest that that was not always the case, and that sometimes the gods would hit the road and see a bit of the world. This paper looks at these portable shrines and attempts to reconstruct both the practicalities of their physical forms and the purposes they might have served for religious Romans.
About the speaker: Jane Sancinito is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She is a specialist in the social and economic history of the ancient Mediterranean world and author of the book, The Reputation of the Roman Merchant (University of Michigan Press, 2024). Her current research focuses on ancient stereotypes and the concept of greed in antiquity. She is also a numismatist, specializing in the coinage of Roman and Byzantine Syria, the iconography of money, and numismatic education.
Maggie Popkin
Saturday, April 17, 2027 at 11:00am
Smith College
33rd Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture
About the speaker: Maggie Popkin is Professor of Art History and Classics at Case Western Reserve University. She specializes in ancient Roman art and architecture. Her research interests include the relationship between architecture, art, and spectacle in the Roman world and the impact of visual culture on memory, cultural affinities, and power dynamics in the ancient world. Prof. Popkin has published articles on a range of topics, from archaic Greek vase painting to materiality in Republican Roman architecture. Her first book, The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), examines the monuments built along the path of the Roman triumph, an elaborate ritual celebrating Roman military victories over foreign peoples, and their role in shaping how Romans experienced and remembered the triumphal ritual. Her second book, Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022), investigates ancient souvenirs and memorabilia and their profound role in mediating memory, knowledge, and cultural affinities in the Roman Empire. Her current research examines the material and visual culture of ancient sport and its role in creating, sustaining, and subverting power structures in the Roman Empire; and the potential of extended reality technologies for studying embodied religion and sacred space.
