Conference program and keynote speakers

'Modern' women of the past? Unearthing gender and antiquity.

AWAWS, AAIA, CCANESA, CCWM and the University of Sydney Departments of Archaeology and Classics & Ancient History are hosting an online conference on Modern Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity, to be held over 5-6 March 2021, ahead of this year's International Women’s Day (8 March 2021).

The provisional program is now available and features 64 papers delivered by scholars from a dozen different countries around the world. ​Registration is essential - click here to register.
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In the week leading up to the conference all registrants will receive access to an online portal for conference announcements and the final booklet featuring abstracts and instructions on how to connect to each session. As part of the conference we are offering two keynote lectures to be as held as online webinars and open to attendees of the conferences and audiences of the co-hosting organisations - read more below and register for these sessions independently of the conference.

​ The final session of the conference will be a publication Q and A with the editors of Liverpool Press' new publication series Women in Ancient Cultures.

Provisional Program
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Keynote Lecture
​"Women in the present, women in the past" by Dr Rachel Pope

This keynote provides a perspective from the UK and Europe on how preventing women’s access to academia and the heritage sector, both historically, and in our contemporary workplace culture, has impacted our understanding of women in the past. We discover the irony that, under the banner of objective practice, late twentieth century archaeologists actively erased past women, or wrote them specifically into domestic roles. We investigate the mechanism through which scholars sought to undermine women’s authority in the past, and in the writing too of disciplinary histories, in favour of patriarchal mythmaking, and how that practice lingers on today. We see how a generation of young scholars had to fight to correct this inherited academic problem in archaeological practice, outside the mainstream, and how a new generation of scholars are now working beyond binary, developing applied method in gender archaeology, to discover the past more as it was, and less in our making.

Speaker: Dr Rachel Pope, Senior Lecturer in European Prehistory, Liverpool University, Founder and a Director of British Women Archaeologists.
When: 7.45pm (AEDT) Friday 5th March 
Note: Speaker will be presenting from Liverpool, UK at 8.45am GMT, Friday 5th March.
​RSVP: Click here to register via eventbrite

Keynote Lecture
​"Where are the Women in Eternity?" by ​Professor Gina Walker

Where are the Women in Eternity juxtaposes the stark reality of millennia of ignorance about earlier female figures and their authority as knowers in the context of sixty years of contemporary Feminist Historical Recovery that ‘Modern’ Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity celebrates.

I describe The New Historia initiative which I direct at The New School with a global collaborative of researchers who are producing authoritative “female biographies” of attested female figures on various platforms for new audiences. I ask, does the avalanche of fresh data about women demand new knowledge-ordering systems that for the first time include a female dimension?
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Speaker: Professor Gina Walker, Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The Center for The New Historia, The New School.
When: 9.30am (AEDT) Saturday 6th March 
Note: Speaker will be presenting from New York, USA at 5.30pm EST, Friday 5th March.
​RSVP: Click here to register via eventbrite

Contact us

If you have any questions about the conference or our key note lectures you can contact the conference convenors ​via [email protected]