NOTE: This event has been rescheduled to March 17 from its original March 3 date.

The Department of Classics presents a guest lecture by Dr. Lana Radloff (Bishop’s University)

Greece is a nexus for (forced) mobility networks in antiquity and the present given its position within the Eastern Mediterranean. Today ca. 119,700 asylum seekers currently reside in Greece, while population estimates suggest that there were roughly 100,000 resident foreigners and slaves living in Athenian territory in the 4th c. BCE (IRC 2021; Akrigg 2019). In past and present, women account for a significant portion of displaced individuals, leading to a “feminization of migration,” but their stories are often left untold and the connection between feminism and migration underexplored (Castles and Miller 1998; Bonifacio 2012). My project, FemiNetworX, aims to develop an explicitly feminist and gendered theoretical and methodological framework to reconstruct the embodied, lived experience of female maritime mobility networks in ancient Greece. Using Miletus in the southeast Aegean (400-31 BCE) as a case study to explore Eastern Mediterranean networks, I ask: what was the role of women as drivers in the creation and maintenance of maritime networks? How did they express gender in the contested and transitory spaces of the sea and seafaring vessels? How do these patterns vary among different ethnicities, classes, and statuses of women? Such questions remain relevant today in these nations.