Julia Kindt | |
---|---|
Occupation(s) | Academic, writer |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge (PhD) |
Doctoral advisor | Robin Osborne |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Classics |
Sub-discipline | Ancient Greek history and religion |
Institutions | University of Sydney |
Notable works | Rethinking Greek Religion |
Julia Kindt FAHA (born 1975) is a German academic and writer who specialises in ancient Greek history and religion. She is a professor at the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney,Australia.
Kindt graduated from the University of Munich in 2000 with a Master of Arts in Ancient History. She then studied at the University of Cambridge,where she completed a PhD in 2003. [1] In 2005,she was selected as one of the inaugural Katharine Graham fellows at the University of Chicago;the fellowship was created by an endowment from the estate of the publisher of The Washington Post . [2]
In 2012,Kindt published her first book,Rethinking Greek Religion,in which she suggests that the scholarly consensus that the polis is the central focus of ancient Greek religion needs to be re-examined. She argues that other aspects of ancient Greek religion deserve more scholarly attention than they have previously received. [3] [4] [5]
Kindt's second book,Revisiting Delphi,was published in 2016. At the time of its publication she was an associate professor at the University of Sydney [6] She was also a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion.
In 2018,she was selected as a Future Fellow with the Australian Research Council,under their ARC Future Fellowships program. The fellowship runs until 2022. [7] [8] She was also elected into the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2018. [9]
In 2019,she became a full professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. As of October 2021,she teaches courses in ancient Greek history and religion. [10]
She is a member of the Editorial Board for Journal of Ancient History. [11]
Delphi, in legend previously called Pytho (Πυθώ), was an ancient sacred precinct and the seat of Pythia, the major oracle who was consulted about important decisions throughout the ancient classical world. The ancient Greeks considered the centre of the world to be in Delphi, marked by the stone monument known as the Omphalos of Delphi (navel).
Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.
Pythia was the name of the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. She specifically served as its oracle and was known as the Oracle of Delphi. Her title was also historically glossed in English as the Pythoness.
Dodona in Epirus in northwestern Greece was the oldest Hellenic oracle, possibly dating to the 2nd millennium BCE according to Herodotus. The earliest accounts in Homer describe Dodona as an oracle of Zeus. Situated in a remote region away from the main Greek poleis, it was considered second only to the Oracle of Delphi in prestige.
Hellenism in a religious context refers to the modern pluralistic religion practiced in Greece and around the world by several communities derived from the beliefs, mythology and rituals from antiquity through and up to today. It is a system of thought and spirituality with a shared culture and values, and common ritualistic, linguistic and literary tradition. More broadly, Hellenism centers itself on the worship of Hellenic deities, namely the twelve Olympians.
Religious practices in ancient Greece encompassed a collection of beliefs, rituals, and mythology, in the form of both popular public religion and cult practices. The application of the modern concept of "religion" to ancient cultures has been questioned as anachronistic. The ancient Greeks did not have a word for 'religion' in the modern sense. Likewise, no Greek writer known to us classifies either the gods or the cult practices into separate 'religions'. Instead, for example, Herodotus speaks of the Hellenes as having "common shrines of the gods and sacrifices, and the same kinds of customs."
Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer of the second century AD. He is famous for his Description of Greece, a lengthy work that describes ancient Greece from his firsthand observations. Description of Greece provides crucial information for making links between classical literature and modern archaeology.
Phryne was an ancient Greek hetaira (courtesan). From Thespiae in Boeotia, she was active in Athens, where she became one of the wealthiest women in Greece. She is best known for her trial for impiety, where she was defended by the orator Hypereides. According to legend, she was acquitted after baring her breasts to the jury, though the historical accuracy of this episode is doubtful. She also modeled for the artists Apelles and Praxiteles, and the Aphrodite of Knidos was based on her. Largely ignored during the renaissance, artistic interest in Phryne began to grow from the end of the eighteenth century; her trial was famously depicted by Jean-Léon Gérôme in the 1861 painting Phryne Before the Areopagus.
Daniel A. Dombrowski is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at Seattle University. Since 2009 he has served as Editor of the journal Process Studies, and is a past president of the Metaphysical Society of America (2018–19).
Elizabeth Mary Jeffreys was a British scholar of Byzantium. She was Bywater and Sotheby Professor of Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature, University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, 1996–2006.
Robin Grimsey Osborne, is an English historian of classical antiquity, who is particularly interested in Ancient Greece.
Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.
The Epirote League was an ancient Greek coalition, or koinon, of Epirote tribes.
Upinder Singh is an Indian historian who is a professor of History and Dean of Faculty at Ashoka University. She is the former head of the History Department at the University of Delhi. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Infosys Prize in the category of Social Sciences (History).
Alexandra Marie Walsham is an English-Australian academic historian. She specialises in early modern Britain and in the impact of the Protestant and Catholic reformations. Since 2010, she has been Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and is currently a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She is co-editor of Past & Present and vice-president of the Royal Historical Society.
Greek divination is the divination practiced by ancient Greek culture as it is known from ancient Greek literature, supplemented by epigraphic and pictorial evidence. Divination is a traditional set of methods of consulting divinity to obtain prophecies (theopropia) about specific circumstances defined beforehand. As it is a form of compelling divinity to reveal its will by the application of method, it is, and has been since classical times, considered a type of magic. Cicero condemns it as superstition. It depends on a presumed "sympathy" between the mantic event and the real circumstance, which he denies as contrary to the laws of nature. If there were any sympathy, and the diviner could discover it, then "men may approach very near to the power of gods."
The Kandahar Greek Edicts of Ashoka are among the Major Rock Edicts of the Indian Emperor Ashoka, which were written in the Greek language and Prakrit language. They were found in the ancient area of Old Kandahar in Kandahar in 1963. It is thought that Old Kandahar was founded in the 4th century BCE by Alexander the Great, who gave it the Ancient Greek name Ἀλεξάνδρεια Ἀραχωσίας.
Theoris of Lemnos was an ancient Greek woman from Lemnos who lived in Athens in the fourth century BC. She worked as a witch or folk-healer. At some point before 323, she was tried and executed along with her children, though the precise details of her offence are unclear. Three ancient accounts survive of her prosecution, which constituted the most detailed account of a witch trial to survive from Classical Greece.
Barbara Graziosi is an Italian classicist and academic. She is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her interests lie in ancient Greek literature, and the way in which readers make it their own. She has written extensively on the subject of Homeric literature, in particular the Iliad, and more generally on the transition of the Twelve Olympians from antiquity to the Renaissance. Her most recent research was a project entitled 'Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry, which was funded by the European Research Council.
Esther Eidinow is a British ancient historian and academic. She specialises in ancient Greece, particularly ancient Greek religion and magic. She has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol since 2017.