Locally Crafted Empires (LoCiS)
Name of applicant
Rubina Raja
Title
Professor
Institution
Aarhus University
Amount
DKK 23,954,184
Year
2024
Type of grant
Semper Ardens: Advance
What?
LoCiS investigates the rich but understudied local portrait cultures of ancient Western Asia with the aim of determining how they reflect local and regional entanglements with and responses to different imperial hegemonies. LoCiS aims to reveal new knowledge about intersecting identities on an individual, local and regional level through a long durée perspective with a global historical outlook.
Why?
The thousands of surviving portraits have not been studied comprehensively neither diachronically, nor in contexts or in cross-regional perspectives. LoCiS aims at offering unprecedented insights into the multilayered narratives of the varied individual experiences in antiquity. This will in turn contribute to a paradigm shift through a materially grounded decolonization debate in the Classics.
How?
Through a full quantification and in-depth study of thousands of portraits, LoCiS creates a chronologically and contextually robust corpus of this part of Western Asia’s rich visual culture, making it accessible through an Open Access database. Such a full quantification study serves as baseline for in-depth analyses of local and regional traditions and imperial entanglements across six centuries.