IAS Scholar Secures Major Grant for Groundbreaking Ancient Portrait Study

Rubina Raja, Member (2019) in the School of Historical Studies, has received a Semper Ardens Advance grant from the Carlsberg Foundation for her groundbreaking project titled Locally Crafted Empires (LoCiS). Such grants are awarded to "internationally recognized professors" in order to "support visionary research projects at the highest international level, aiming at scientific breakthroughs."

Raja's project, set to launch in the summer of 2025, will investigate how local portrait cultures in ancient West Asia reflected identities and interactions under different empires and their rulers. LoCiS aims to study thousands of portraits that survive from ancient and late antique West Asia across various cultures, empires, and time periods, from the time of the Hellenistic and local kingdoms and the Roman Empire to the Eastern Parthian Empire and the period of early Christianity. 

The project will contribute valuable new insight by conducting a comprehensive and diachronic study, namely an investigation of how the portrait traditions changed over time. It will also study the portraits in context, providing a vital cross-regional perspective. Significantly, the project will make the corpus of portraits available to scholars worldwide through an Open Access database.

"The new LoCiS project shows why long term and in-depth humanities studies—in particular, those of an archaeological and art historical character—are crucial for disentangling and understanding world historical events often otherwise invisible to us in the written records," states Raja, who serves as Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Aarhus University. 

Some of the ideas for the LoCiS project emerged during Raja's IAS Membership, when she studied the largest corpus of Roman-period portraits, more than 4,000, stemming from Palmyra in Syria.

"While at IAS, I was offered the opportunity to undertake in-depth research on Palmyra and its portrait habit as well as discuss my broader ideas with colleagues," she continues. "The months at IAS were pivotal to developing the LoCiS project which brings to the forefront why humanities disciplines—including those that deal with the more distant past—also contribute new and crucial knowledge about human action in today's society. We cannot do away with the past."

Read more about Locally Crafted Empires on the Carlsberg Foundation website.

Date