Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories

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This interdisciplinary edited volume explores the notion of queenship as it has manifest from antiquity to the present, in contexts ranging from political acts to art production. Featuring the work of scholars, educators, curators and artists, this book gathers temporally and geographically distinct ideas about queenship into a single discursive space. Invigorating the conversation around powerful historical women and their legacies, the contributors discuss queenship as a concept with contemporary urgencyfrom North America to Africa, and Europe to Asiaforegrounding critical methodologies and creative interventions that address the gaps within archives and current cultural and socio-political representation.

Although traditional narratives present queens of the ancient Mediterranean world primarily as the wives, daughters and mothers of kings, such as Semiramis and Cleopatra, the ways in which royal women wielded powerwhether directly or indirectlywere actually multivariate, highly nuanced and culturally specific. The current contributions featured in this volume are concerned with teasing out the modern assumptions that have heavily influenced interpretations of gender norms and power dynamics in antiquity. In addition to re-examining primary sources, this volume scrutinizes the historiographies, methodologies and stereotypes that have shaped knowledge production and popular imagination over the course of hundreds and even thousands of years. As such, contributors present different kinds of receptions and speculative articulations of historical queenship, thus forging new paths forward for reconstructing and imagining queenships from antiquity to the present.

Reviews

[This] collection of essays provides important insights into how we should be thinking about queens and queenship in both conceptual and historical terms. It will be a significant contribution for any further studies on queens, queenship, and the power and accoutrements of female royalty. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review *
This book does not try to provide just another academic overview of approaches to queenship in a cross-cultural, comparative perspective, but rather it tries to strike at the core of what royal female power means in the ancient Mediterranean through to the present day. The immensely positive contribution that this volume makes is to put the burgeoning field of ancient queenship studies in dialogue with contemporary artistic and cultural understandings of queenship from a variety of fascinating angles. * Alex McAuley, Lecturer in Classics & Ancient History, University of Auckland, New Zealand *

Author Bio

Patricia Eunji Kim is Assistant Professor at New York University, USA, and Senior Editor and Curator-at-Large at Monument Lab. She is author of The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power (forthcoming) and co-editor of The National Monument Audit (2021) and Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (2020).

Anastasia Tchaplyghine is Guest Curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum, USA, and Registrar for the University of Pennsylvanias Iraq Heritage Stabilization Program at Nimrud and Nineveh, USA. She is co-editor of A Wonder to Behold: Craftsmanship and the Creation of Babylons Ishtar Gate (2019).