The Ancient Studies at Harvard Visitor Series Presents: Simcha Gross
Simcha Gross , Assistant Professor of Ancient Rabbinics at University of Pennsylvania and Honorary Starr Fellow at the CJS (Spring 2025), will present:
Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Simcha Gross (Univ. of Pennsylvania; visitor in Spring 2025 at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies)
Lecture: “Good Fences Make Bad Neighbors: Communities and Empire on the Roman-Sasanian Frontier”
5:00 – 6:30 pm / Sever Hall Room 103
The competition between the Roman and Sasanian empires for control of the frontier has been told many times, but typically from an imperial perspective. This lecture shifts the focus to the entangled relationships between empires and frontier communities and their impact on intergroup relations. In this volatile landscape, collective identities were not fixed but shaped by shifting political and social pressures. As imperial concerns mobilized, crystallized, and destabilized these identities, they gave rise to opposing forces—fueling both deep friction and intense intercommunal cooperation, reinforcing rigidly policed borders while also fostering forms of belonging that transcended them.
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Simcha Gross (Univ. of Pennsylvania; visitor in Spring 2025 at the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies)
Workshop: “The Aramaic Incantation Bowls: From Literacy to Materiality”
12 noon–1:30 pm, CSWR Conference Room, Harvard Divinity School
The Aramaic Incantation Bowls have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of interreligious contact and exchange in late antique Iraq, the social world of Babylonian Jews, and the cosmologies that shaped practices of protection and control. Yet significant questions remain. This session provides an overview of the incantation bowl corpus and its role in scholarship before turning to key avenues for future research, including the so-called pseudo-script bowls, issues of literacy and materiality, and the performative dimensions of these textual objects.
