Amelia Brown

My research field is the history and archaeology of Greek culture in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean. I have made notable contributions on late antique religion, ancient travel, and the history of the port cities of Corinth, Thessaloniki, Cyprus and Malta. My work is known among Classical scholars in the US, Greece, Malta, the UK and Australia for its innovative combination of archaeological and historical methodologies and its examination of marginalized areas of Greek history, especially the era of Late Antiquity. I have excavation and research experience at Greek, Cypriot and Maltese sites and museums. I convened conferences at UQ on the theme of 'Byzantine Culture in Translation' for the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies and on the theme of ‘Land and Sea in the Early Middle Ages’ at UQ for the Australian Early Medieval Association’s 8th Annual Meeting. I have organised panels for the Archaeological Institute of America, the pre-eminent society for professional Classical archaeologists and historians in the US, and I contribute papers frequently to their annual meeting, volunteered with their San Francisco society, and chaired the Interest Group in Medieval and post-Medieval Greek Archaeology. As a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, I have travelled widely in Greece, the Balkans, Turkey and Malta, and made connections with academics there. Since coming to Australia I have contributed to the activities of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA) through my work on Cythera, leading UQ summer school undergraduate Study Tours (course code ANCH2050), organising the Queensland Friends of the AAIA, welcoming visiting professors and writing for their newsletter and bulletin. After writing my undergraduate honours thesis on the history and monuments of Byzantine Thessaloniki at Princeton, my postgraduate research focused on the Greek culture of Late Antiquity. My Master’s thesis of 2002 at U.C. Berkeley, 'Hellenic Heritage & Christian Challenge: Conflict over Panhellenic Sanctuaries in Late Antiquity,' outlined the evidence for the conversion of Greek sanctuaries to Christian uses, and sometimes violent competition for these sacred spaces in the 5th and 6th centuries. I edited this for the Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity 5 conference in 2003, and published it in 2006. I helped contribute to a shift in scholarship towards the idea that ancient polytheistic religion was the dominant religious system far into Late Antiquity, and put up substantial resistance to Christianity. I gained primary experience with ancient Greek religious monuments by excavating a temple of Apollo on Kos with the University of Athens in 1998 and sanctuaries in Messene and Corinth in 2001-2005. I completed field exams in Greek Religion and Roman art for my 2008 PhD in Ancient History & Mediterranean Archaeology at Berkeley. My current research on ancient Greek maritime religion builds on my 2008 PhD dissertation, 'The City of Corinth and Urbanism in Late Antique Greece.' Invitations to speak about my Corinth research to academic audiences have come yearly since 2005 around the world. I organized a panel on Corinth at the Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting 2008, and in May 2011 was a keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of Early Christianity conference at Macquarie University in Sydney, with the theme for the conference of ‘Corinth: Paul, People and Politics.’ Corinth Excavations Director G.D.R. Sanders invited me to excavate with him and publish late antique portraits from Corinth, resulting in an article in the A* journal Hesperia, and participation in Oxford’s Last Statues of Antiquity project and the Danish-Canadian Afterlives of Greek and Roman sculpture project, both published in 2016.