Standardizing Standardization

Date
Fri February 14th 2020, 12:00 - 1:30pm
Event Sponsor
Humanities Center, Department of Classics
Location
Building 110
Standardizing Standardization

The notion of “standardization” is important in the study of a number of different substantive domains in the study of antiquity—for instance, manufacture, formal metrology, bureaucracy—but it is not clear whether or to what extent the same phenomenon is being referred to by the term. Beginning with a look at both a variety of data sets from across these domains (e.g. stone building elements, official weights, city plans) and at the kinds of claims that are made about them, this workshop will attempt to open up the questions (a) whether we should think of standardization as a unitary phenomenon, and (b) even if not, to what extent can our understandings of the various sorts usefully inform each other.

Professor Andrew M. Riggsby is the Lucy Shoe Meritt Professor in Classics and professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin.  He holds an AB from Harvard and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He has published four books (most recently Mosaics of Knowledge, Oxford University Press 2019) and dozens of articles on various areas of Roman history, law, and culture. His War in Words: Caesar in Gaul and Rome (University of Texas Press, 2006) won the Association of American Publishers (Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division) award for the most outstanding book published in classics and ancient history. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and was the Stanley Kelley Jr. Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University.

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