Peter Keegan
I am a Professor of Roman History at Macquarie University. My research ranges from sexuality and body history to the spatial dynamics of social relations in urban and periurban contexts and the epigraphy of ephemeral graffiti and death. As Associate Dean Learning and Teaching (Arts, 2015-2021), I aimed to surface initiatives which engage students as partners and change agents, as well to develop blended and online learning and teaching strategies for a global student cohort.
Phone: 61-2-9850-8819
Phone: 61-2-9850-8819
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Books by Peter Keegan
This theoretically informed study of Livy’s monumental narrative charts the fascinating links between episodes containing references to women in prominent roles and the historian’s treatment of Rome’s evolutionary foundation story. Explicitly gendered in relation to the socio-cultural contexts informing the narrative, the author’s background, the literary landscape of Livy's Rome, and the subsequent historiographical commentary, this volume offers a comprehensive, coherent and contextualised overview of all episodes in Ab Urbe Condita relating to women as agents of historical change.
As well as proving invaluable insights into socio-cultural history for Classicists, Livy’s Women will also be of interest to instructors, researchers, and students of female representation in history in general.
Previous studies of tombstones and inscriptions dedicated to divinities have focused on methods of assigning names in Roman society, the age at marriage and death of demographic populations across the Roman Empire, relations of kinship, marriage, amity and dependence among elite and sub-altern families and communities, and the performance of acts in accordance with traditional forms of belief and custom. The present volume wishes to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the corpus of private Latin inscriptions from Roman Italy about the identity, social condition and cultural activity of men and women participating in the process of epigraphic commemoration and dedication. In particular, this study hopes to demonstrate that women participated as significantly as men in the process in a variety of ways and contexts usually regarded as prominently or exclusively male, and in certain circumstances left behind the trace or residue of a uniquely female perspective on their world.
To these ends, this book does the following: locate, identify, translate and interpret information inscribed as text and images in private and public places by women and men living in the cosmopolis of Rome under the rule of the early Caesars. The underlying argument is straightforward. In conjunction with a synthesis of modern theoretical and methodological approaches, historical analysis and interpretation of the inscriptions of ancient Rome can generate a radically new view of how and why ancient Roman men and women inscribed written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them. As part of such a perspective, this book situates the manner and subject of private and public female communication within the historical, cultural and linguistic contexts from which epigraphic practice emerged. Consequently, this study highlights and assesses the relationship between epigraphic representations of Roman culture and the nature of the society within which these representations - by and about women living in Rome – were produced.
By engaging as directly as theoretical and methodological criteria allow with a gendered alterity, this study of the epigraphic landscape in general, and private inscriptions in Latin in particular, will mesh more vividly with the social-linguistic resonances of the contextualized residue that survives. Throughout, an array of critical tools will be applied to the variety of selected burial and votive contexts – each situated as an assemblage of inscribed text, commemorative or dedicatory structure, and associated funerary or offering space. This should develop a refined perspective on ancient discursive practices specifically encompassing the intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity, and provide a comparative series of case-studies against which to test any of the current definitions of sexed identity, gender relations and social-cultural condition."
Papers by Peter Keegan
KEY WORDS
graffiti, non-official discourse, cultural space, Pompeii
‘typical woman’s’ name led to the fancy of lawyers that ‘every woman’ who entered into a kind of legal contract (coemptio) bore the name of Gaia. Plutarch conflates the misnomer by relaying the formula spoken by a newly espoused bride (under duress) to
her husband: ‘where you are Gaius, I will be Gaia’. Quintilian reifies the impression that Gaia is a typical name conventionally used of ‘any woman’ in his explanation of the retrograde C: ‘Gaius is denoted by the letter C, while the inverse means (a) woman’. It
would appear that the dominant Graeco-Roman discourse manufactures a signifier expressly suited to the symbolic transmission of a deeply embedded sociocultural premise: (a) Woman is (the) Inverse of (a) Man. This paper seeks to explore a single epigraphic manifestation of such a pervasive discursive formation: the use of retrograde C in certain inscriptions of late Republican and early Augustan Rome. The tantalising questions raised by epigraphic Gaia, in relation to the inscriptions belonging to the city of Rome and its environs (CIL VI), provide a fruitful point of entry into how ancient Mediterranean discourse represented and excluded individuals and groups on the margins of Roman society.
This theoretically informed study of Livy’s monumental narrative charts the fascinating links between episodes containing references to women in prominent roles and the historian’s treatment of Rome’s evolutionary foundation story. Explicitly gendered in relation to the socio-cultural contexts informing the narrative, the author’s background, the literary landscape of Livy's Rome, and the subsequent historiographical commentary, this volume offers a comprehensive, coherent and contextualised overview of all episodes in Ab Urbe Condita relating to women as agents of historical change.
As well as proving invaluable insights into socio-cultural history for Classicists, Livy’s Women will also be of interest to instructors, researchers, and students of female representation in history in general.
Previous studies of tombstones and inscriptions dedicated to divinities have focused on methods of assigning names in Roman society, the age at marriage and death of demographic populations across the Roman Empire, relations of kinship, marriage, amity and dependence among elite and sub-altern families and communities, and the performance of acts in accordance with traditional forms of belief and custom. The present volume wishes to ask what conclusions can be drawn from the corpus of private Latin inscriptions from Roman Italy about the identity, social condition and cultural activity of men and women participating in the process of epigraphic commemoration and dedication. In particular, this study hopes to demonstrate that women participated as significantly as men in the process in a variety of ways and contexts usually regarded as prominently or exclusively male, and in certain circumstances left behind the trace or residue of a uniquely female perspective on their world.
To these ends, this book does the following: locate, identify, translate and interpret information inscribed as text and images in private and public places by women and men living in the cosmopolis of Rome under the rule of the early Caesars. The underlying argument is straightforward. In conjunction with a synthesis of modern theoretical and methodological approaches, historical analysis and interpretation of the inscriptions of ancient Rome can generate a radically new view of how and why ancient Roman men and women inscribed written and visual messages about themselves and the world around them. As part of such a perspective, this book situates the manner and subject of private and public female communication within the historical, cultural and linguistic contexts from which epigraphic practice emerged. Consequently, this study highlights and assesses the relationship between epigraphic representations of Roman culture and the nature of the society within which these representations - by and about women living in Rome – were produced.
By engaging as directly as theoretical and methodological criteria allow with a gendered alterity, this study of the epigraphic landscape in general, and private inscriptions in Latin in particular, will mesh more vividly with the social-linguistic resonances of the contextualized residue that survives. Throughout, an array of critical tools will be applied to the variety of selected burial and votive contexts – each situated as an assemblage of inscribed text, commemorative or dedicatory structure, and associated funerary or offering space. This should develop a refined perspective on ancient discursive practices specifically encompassing the intersections of gender, class, and ethnicity, and provide a comparative series of case-studies against which to test any of the current definitions of sexed identity, gender relations and social-cultural condition."
KEY WORDS
graffiti, non-official discourse, cultural space, Pompeii
‘typical woman’s’ name led to the fancy of lawyers that ‘every woman’ who entered into a kind of legal contract (coemptio) bore the name of Gaia. Plutarch conflates the misnomer by relaying the formula spoken by a newly espoused bride (under duress) to
her husband: ‘where you are Gaius, I will be Gaia’. Quintilian reifies the impression that Gaia is a typical name conventionally used of ‘any woman’ in his explanation of the retrograde C: ‘Gaius is denoted by the letter C, while the inverse means (a) woman’. It
would appear that the dominant Graeco-Roman discourse manufactures a signifier expressly suited to the symbolic transmission of a deeply embedded sociocultural premise: (a) Woman is (the) Inverse of (a) Man. This paper seeks to explore a single epigraphic manifestation of such a pervasive discursive formation: the use of retrograde C in certain inscriptions of late Republican and early Augustan Rome. The tantalising questions raised by epigraphic Gaia, in relation to the inscriptions belonging to the city of Rome and its environs (CIL VI), provide a fruitful point of entry into how ancient Mediterranean discourse represented and excluded individuals and groups on the margins of Roman society.
Keywords: Transformative learning, Online learning and teaching, Action learning, Collaborative learning,
Critical reflection, Metacognition
(a) to examine how men and women lived in the ancient world, the spaces they occupied, the roles they played and the laws which governed them;
(b) to understand how cultures in the ancient Mediterranean defined the categories of masculine and feminine and how these categories were deployed in the discourses of literature, politics, law, religion and medicine; and, finally,
(c) to consider how ancient conceptions of gender have shaped our contemporary views of male and female roles.
The seminar will also address the problems posed both by literary and non-literary source materials, and the question of how the disciplines of ancient history and classical studies have dealt with the issue of gender and sexuality in the past several decades.