Faculty

In October at the Oriental Institute, several professors participated in the lecture series "Medicine and Magic in the Ancient World, A Search for the Cure", which sought to explore the connection between the physical and the psychological aspect of healing within ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. Robert Ritner, Professor in Egyptology, opened the series with his talk titled “The Theory and Practice of Medicine and Magic in Ancient Egypt”, Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities, and the College, and Elizabeth Asmis, Professor in Classics, presented "Medical Healing in Ancient Greece". Walter Farber, Professor of Assyriology, discussed how people came to understand and fight against contagious diseases in his lecture titled "Diseases and Epidemics in Ancient Mesopotamia: Medical Conceptualization and Responses", while Robert Biggs, Professor Emeritus in Assyriology, focused on Mesopotamian religious practitioners and their approach to illness and misfortune in his talk "Religious and Magical Elements in Babylonian Medical Practice." The series closed on October 27 with a presentation by John Wee, a postdoctoral scholar in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, titled "Mesopotamian Texts and the Knowledge Assumptions of Medical Diagnosis". To find out about upcoming lectures at the Oriental Institute, please visit their Events and Programs web page.

Clifford Ando, Professor of Classics and the College, has received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Winners of the €45,000 prize are invited to spend a year collaborating with a colleague in Germany. Ando is an expert on law, religion and government in the Roman Empire and plans to collaborate with Jörg Rüpke, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt’s Max Weber Kolleg.

From the article:

During his stay at the University of Erfurt, Ando plans to finish Roman Social Imaginaries, a book exploring cognition and metaphor in Roman social thought. In collaboration with Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College, and Chicago's Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, Ando and Rüpke are also organizing a conference on the notion of public and private in ancient Mediterranean law and religion.

More about the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation can be found here.