Naoise Mac Sweeney, PhD

Professor, Institute of Classical Archaeology

University of Vienna, Austria

About:

How did the ancient Greek world come into being? Scholarship has proposed many models over the last two centuries, from the Dorian Migration to Greek Colonisation, largely predicated on ideas of diasporic migration and cultural expansion. In this lecture, I shall argue instead that the ancient Greek world was forged through an entirely different set of processes – multiscalar circulation and cultural convergence, eventually culminating in the retrospective ethnogenesis of the Greeks. The lecture showcases the work of the ‘Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World’ project, funded by the European Research Council.

Bio:

Naoíse Mac Sweeney is Professor of Classical Archaeology (Greek) at the University of Vienna. Her work focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction in the Iron Age to Classical Greek world, with a particular focus on Anatolia. A subsidiary strand of her research considers the intersection of modern politics and reception. She is the author of books including Community Identity and Archaeology (2011), Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (2013), Troy: Myth, City, Icon (2018) and, most recently, The West: A New History of an Old Idea (2023).