Speakers
Click on a paper title below to access the abstract
Altay Coşkun
Altay Coşkun is Professor and Associate Chair of Classical Studies at the University of Waterloo and Director of the Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies. He gained his PhD (on Ausonius, 1999) and Habilitation (on Galatian history, 2007) at Trier University. His postdoctoral appointment at Oxford was dedicated to Late Roman legislation (2000-2002) and his Humboldt fellowship at Exeter w to Galatian studies (2009, 2011). He also publishes on Roman diplomacy and citizenship, Greek colonization, the Black Sea, and especially the Hellenistic kingdoms. His publications include Seleukid Royal Women (co-edited with Alex McAuley, 2016), Rome and the Seleukid East (co-edited with David Engels, 2019), Ethnic Constructs, Royal Dynasties and Historical Geography around the Black Sea Littoral (ed., 2021), Galatian Victories and Other Studies into the Agency and Identity of the Galatians (ed., 2022), Seleukid Ideology: Creation, Reception and Response (co-edited with Richard Wenghofer, 2023), and The Seleukids at War: Recruitment, Composition, and Organizaton (co-ed. with Benjamin Scolnic).Together with Scolnic, he also runs the Seleukid Lecture Series (2021-) and the creative platform Unheard Voices of the Past (2022-). And he is the academic advisor of the creative journal Epic Threads.
Eva Anagnostou-Laotides
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney. She was a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council (2017–2022), while she currently leads an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the Crises of Leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire (250-1000 CE). Her research focuses on the use of mythic and religious traditions in the Hellenistic and Augustan periods, as well as the reception of Greek philosophy in Christianity. She is the author of Eros and Ritual (Gorgias, 2005 and 2013) and In the Garden of the Gods (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of several volumes, including Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy (Brill, 2020) and Later Platonists and Their Heirs (Brill, 2023). She just completed a monograph on The History of Inebriation from Plato to Landino and is working on another book on Sexuality in Greek Epigrams and Later European Literature.
Penelope Carpentier
Penelope Carpentier has recently completed her PhD at Macquarie University, with her research focusing on social imaginaries produced by people in the region of Syria and Phoenicia under Ptolemaic rule. As part of this research, she has been awarded a junior fellowship with the Australian Centre for Ancient Numismatic Studies, and the Society for the Study of Early Christianity Tyndale Scholarship. After completing her Masters of Research with distinction (on the political power of the Jerusalem temple prior to the outbreak of the Maccabean revolt), she lectured for three years in biblical interpretation and ancient languages at the Namibia Evangelical Theological Seminary in Windhoek, Namibia.
Francesca Della Guardia
Francesca Della Guardia (1993) is an early-career researcher in Ancient Greek History. She recently held a Research Fellowship at the University of Bergamo under the supervision of Prof. Monica D’Agostini. She earned her PhD in Ancient Greek History from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan with a dissertation on the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes (246-241 BCE), supervised by Prof. Franca Landucci. Her research focuses on Ptolemaic kingship, dynastic ideology, royal women, and the political use of religion and family imagery in the Hellenistic world. She has published on Ptolemaic foreign policy and on the role of Berenice II in shaping dynastic image and interstate relations in the eastern Mediterranean.
Angus Llewellyn Jacobson
Angus Llewellyn Jacobson is a Tasmanian Aboriginal PhD candidate and Graduate Teaching Fellow in Classics at the University of Tasmania. While his thesis focuses specifically on the Seleucid-Antigonid οἰκειότης (kinship) as a mechanism of dynastic preservation and control from the Battle of Ipsus to Antigonus Gonatas’ death, his research areas include numismatics, ancient diplomacy, Greek and Latin literature, royal/imperial ideologies, and Late Antiquity, particularly the reign of Julian. He was the 2025 awardee for the Near Eastern Archaeological Foundation’s Catherine Southwell-Keeley Travel Grant and is an active member of the Seleukid Study Group.
Paul McKechnie
Paul McKechnie is an Honorary Associate Professor at Macquarie University. He edited Ptolemy II Philadelphus and his World (2008, with Philippe Guillaume) and Ptolemy I and the Transformation of Egypt (2018, with Jennifer Cromwell). His other publications include Christianizing Asia Minor (2019).
Raúl Navas-Moreno
Raúl Navas-Moreno is a graduate in Ancient Studies [UAB, 2022] and holder of a Master’s degree in Ancient Cultures and Languages [UAB, 2023]. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in Studies in Antiquity and the Middle Ages [UAB, 2023–2027] and predoctoral researcher (FPU) at the Department of Ancient and Medieval Sciences[UAB], working on a doctoral dissertation entitled The Seleucid Empire and the Iranian world: Sources on interaction, continuity and change in the Hellenistic Near East. His research interests cover the Seleucid world, Hellenistic Iran, and the memory of Greco-Macedonian domination of the Near East in Iranian and Arabic literary traditions.
Natasha Parnian
Dr Natasha Parnian is an early career researcher and recent PhD graduate at Macquarie University. Her research examines the afterlives of Persian kingship across the Achaemenid and Sasanian worlds, exploring how imperial ideologies, intercultural contact, and historical memory shaped political narratives in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. She was a 2023 Junior Fellow of Australian Centre for Ancient Numismatic Studies (ACANS) and was awarded the Melville Jones Prize in Numismatics in 2025. Her most recent publication includes, "A World in Crisis: Reconstructing Identity in Late Antique Armenia" published in Hermathena 2025.
Stefan Pfeiffer
Since 2013 Stefan Pfeiffer has been professor of Ancient History at Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Prior to this he was professor for the ancient world and Europe at the Technische Universität Chemnitz (2010–2013), where he also was dean of the Faculty of Philosophy (2012–2013). He started his academic career after his state examination (2002) and his Magister Artium (2001). Since then, he has published nine monographs (two of them co-authored), eight edited volumes, and 61 articles. His areas of specialisation are the history of Graeco-Roman Egypt, the ruler cult in antiquity, and Judaism in Alexandria. He has, among other aspects, worked on multilingual texts from Egypt (the Canopus Decree, PhD 2004, and the victory stela of C. Cornelius Gallus, 2009), and published a monograph on the emperor cult in Egypt (Habilitation 2010). Furthermore, he has written a study-book on Greek and Latin epigraphical records from Egypt (2015, second augmented edition 2020) and has published a general overview on the Ptolemaic Empire (2017), and together with Friedhelm Hoffmann he has published a small book on the Memphis Decree of the Rosetta Stone (2021). In the same year he also published an extensive commentary of 3 Maccabees.