This workshop is intended to be an introduction to making research and teaching practice and research outputs accessible. It will cover the basics of classroom design and alternative assessments, as well as the core accessibility features of PowerPoint and some considerations when publishing and disseminating research. The workshop will be run by members of AWAWS, and we invite anyone in Ancient World Studies in Australasia who is interested to attend this event.

Date: Friday 25th June 2021
Time: 11:00 AEST (UTC + 10)
Duration: 1 hour
Format: online, via Zoom
Registration: via Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/awaws-workshop-accessible-research-and-teaching-practices-tickets-157441274089)

We are delighted to be joined by five ancient world scholars living with a disability from Australasia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, who will cover a range of topics about navigating Ancient World Studies and academia and studying disability in the ancient world. The panel discussion will be followed by a live question and answer session, and we invite anyone in Ancient World Studies who is interested to attend this event.

Date: Tuesday 29th June 2021
Time: 17:00 AEST (UTC + 10)
Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes (including a short break)
Format: online, via Zoom
Registration: via Eventbrite (https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/awaws-panel-disability-in-ancient-world-studies-tickets-157442742481)
​
Please note: these sessions will be recorded, and closed captions (CC) will be enabled on Zoom. A copy of the recording, PowerPoint, and edited transcript will be made available after the workshop upon request to [email protected].

For our upcoming panel discussion on disablism in Ancient World Studies we are delighted to be joined by five ancient world scholars living with a disability. Our incredible panel includes:

• Alexandra F. Morris
• David Chapman
• Kyle Lewis Jordan
• Prof. Isabel Ruffell
• Mason Shrader

Every day NEXT WEEK (14-18 Jun) we will be introducing our panel profiles. Stay tuned to hear more about these wonderful scholars via Twitter and Facebook!

And make sure to RSVP for the panel Tues 29/06/2021, 17:00 AEST (UTC + 10). It will be online, via zoom.

We are seeking contributors for our History of Women in Ancient World Studies blog. The blog aims to capture the often neglected stories of women in the fields of classics, ancient history, archaeology, ancient languages, and adjacent study areas in our region of the world. These women could be academics, independent scholars, teachers, mentors, museum workers, administrators, philanthropists, and supporters who through their generosity, ideas or scholarship contributed to the flourishing of ancient world studies in Australia and New Zealand. We are also interested in posts on methodologies and research projects that aim to highlight the contributions of women in the field. Posts can be in the form of biographies, personal reflections or interviews - and if you have another idea, we’d love to hear it.

If you are interested in contributing and have an idea for a subject please get in touch with an outline of the article you would like to contribute. If you are interested in being part of this project, but don’t know where to begin, that’s ok! Get in touch with blog co-ordinator Candace Richards either via [email protected] or [email protected]. We can help you discover more about women in the field and find an appropriate subject who you want to learn and write about. Student members are particularly encouraged to get involved.
 
If you have any questions or feedback on the blog so far, we’d love to hear your thoughts! Just leave us a comment below!

Last year AWAWS Brisbane hosted The Cancelled Conference, and asked postgraduate students to put their cancelled conference papers to good use. The conference was a great success and one of the most rewarding aspects of the conference was the feedback presenting postgraduate students received from senior academics who attended. 

This year, in partnership with the AWAWS Academic Mentoring Program, AWAWS Brisbane is hosting The Cancelled Conference 2.0: a postgraduate conference designed to give students the opportunity to receive feedback on their work from established academics who are invested in supporting and fostering postgraduate scholarship.

There will be a number of AWAWS mentors in attendance and chairing the panels. This will ensure every presenter has the opportunity to receive critical and constructive feedback from leading academics in their field. There will also be a plenary discussion panel about the AWAWS Academic Mentoring Program. This session will highlight the benefits of academic mentoring and showcase positive academic outcomes achieved through the program by past mentors and mentees. 

Who is this conference for?

• Postgraduate students involved in the AWAWS mentoring program who would like to showcase their work to their mentors, their peers, and the broader community of ancient world studies
• Postgraduate students who are interested in joining the AWAWS mentoring program and would like to see what the mentoring program can do for them
• Postgraduates students seeking critical and constructive feedback from academics in their field 

This conference is open to all AWAWS postgraduate members. It will be held online to give students an opportunity to meet and mingle with academics in their field of study from across Australia and New Zealand who might be otherwise inaccessible due to distance. 
​
Date and Location 
The Cancelled Conference 2.0 will be held between Wednesday 29 September – Thursday 30 September 2021.
The conference will be held virtually through Zoom. Once the program has been finalised information on how to register and attend each session will be circulated. Please save the date in the meantime. 
Conditions 

• 20 minute paper + 10 minute question time 
• Paper submissions are open to all AWAWS postgraduate members: renew or join here.
• There is no set theme for this conference, all topics are welcome 
• Audience attendance is free and open to the public
• We stress that the aim of the conference is to support and encourage postgraduate research, and we invite all postgraduates, academics, and industry professionals to attend and share this aim. 

How to apply
To apply for the conference please send an abstract and your completed submission form to AWAWS Brisbane [email protected] - Submissions are due by Monday 26 July. 

If you have any further questions about the conference, you can contact us via our email address or Facebook page. 
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: @awawsbrisbane 

​Conference Convenors
Brianna Sands, MPhil candidate (UQ), Co-chair AWAWS Brisbane Chapter
Tyla Cascaes, PhD candidate (UQ), Co-chair AWAWS Brisbane Chapter ​

​The AWAWS Academic Mentoring Program is now in its second year and we are seeking expressions of interest from potential mentees interested participating in the 2021 program.
 
The program, based on the Spectrum Academic Mentoring Program, aims to establish a supportive mentoring culture and provide opportunities to connect individuals from diverse backgrounds and with different levels of experience from across the Australasian ancient world studies community. 
 
The establishment of mentoring relationships provides numerous benefits, fostering personal and professional growth. By sharing knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours, a mentoring relationship can:

• Support the definition and pursuit of goals
• Expand perspectives and strengthen self-development plans
• Increase self-awareness and personal growth
• Enhance motivation and work satisfaction

 
There are 31 mentors in the program with capacity to mentor over 70 mentees across a broad range of areas, from research and learning and teaching, to career progression within and beyond academia. Check out the Meet Our Mentors page for detailed mentor profiles.
                                                                                          
To participate in the program you will need to submit an Expression of Interest form (download below) to the program’s interim coordinator, Sarah Midford, at [email protected]. There is no deadline to submit EoIs, but each mentor has a limit on the number of mentees they can take on. If you have a particular mentor you would like to work with, it is advisable to get in earlier rather than later.
 
You will need to be a current member to participate. If you aren’t sure of your membership status you can email [email protected] to check. If you need to renew, then visit the Membership page to join.
 
We look forward to welcoming you into the program! If you have any questions at all, just get in touch with Sarah Midford. 

Professor Gina Walker delivered this lecture as part of our recent 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity ​conference. In this lecture Professor Walker juxtaposed 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. Dr Walker described the New Historia initiative she directs 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. She asked, does the avalanche of fresh data about women demand new knowledge-ordering systems that for the first time include a female dimension?

Dr Rachel Pope gave a rousing keynote lecture at our recent conference 'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity. This lecture 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 discovered 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 investigated 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 saw 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.

We're writing to wish you all a very Happy International Women's Day. The theme this year is very fittingly 'Choose to Challenge' 

International Women's Day 2021
International Women's Day (March 8) is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality. IWD has occurred for well over a century, with the first IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over a million people.

AWAWS celebrated International Women's Day this year by co-sponsoring an online conference "'Modern' Women of the Past? Unearthing Gender and Antiquity' from 5-7 March.  
 
It was a truly international conference with 409 delegates and close to 140 institutions represented, from Australasia, Africa, India, the UK & Europe, the Middle East and North and South America. 
 
Brilliantly, we had 64 papers delivered by scholars from a dozen different countries around the world.  
 
We were also treated to two outstanding keynote lectures. The first, by the dynamic Dr Rachel Pope (@preshitorian) from the University of Liverpool and Founder and Director of British Women Archaeologists, was entitled "Women in the Present, Women in the Past". Rachel examined, in the context of the UK and Europe, how preventing women’s access to academia and the heritage sector, both in the past and in the contemporary workplace, has impacted our understanding of women in the past.
 
The other keynote delivered by Professor Gina Luria Walker, Professor of Women's Studies and Director of The Center for The New Historia (@TheNewHistoria), The New School, New York city, was entitled "Where are the Women in Eternity?" and juxtaposed the reality of millennia of ignorance about earlier female figures in the context of sixty years of Feminist Historical Recovery. 
 
If you were unable to listen to these two lectures, please stay tuned as links to the recordings will appear on the AWAWS website in the very near future! 
 
With warmest wishes and have a fabulous day!
 The AWAWS Executive Committee

As we begin a new year, our mentoring program will be refreshed with mentees and mentors being added to the program. If you have submitted an expression of interest email or form and haven't heard back from us please get in touch with our interim program co-ordinator Dr Sarah Midford [email protected].

Thank  you to everyone who has reached out around accessing information on our website. Your feedback is most helpful for running this site and making sure we provide you with all the details you need to participate in the program.

Keep an eye out on your emails over the next few weeks for all the latest from our mentoring program and how you can join as a mentor or as a mentee.

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

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

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