
Peter KeeganMacquarie University · Department of Ancient History
Peter Keegan
Doctor of Philosophy
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28
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Introduction
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 engaged students as partners and change agents, as well to develop blended and online learning and teaching strategies for a global student cohort.
Additional affiliations
January 2009 - present
March 2005 - present
Education
January 1998 - March 2002
Publications
Publications (28)
The custom in the ancient world of fabricating inscriptions so as to confer credibility to otherwise suspect or unreliable declarations of great age or importance of one kind or another is well known. This fraudulent practice continued into the post-classical era, reflected notably in thousands of counterfeit Latin inscriptions (the so-called falsa...
Livy’s Women explores the profound questions arising from the presence of women of influence and power in the socio-political canvas of one of the most important histories of Rome and the Roman people, Ab Urbe Condita (From the Foundation of the City).
This theoretically informed study of Livy’s monumental narrative charts the fascinating links be...
GRAFFITI FROM POMPEII - (P.) Lohmann Graffiti als Interaktionsform. Geritzte Inschriften in den Wohnhäusern Pompejis. (Materiale Textkulturen 16.) Pp. x + 486, figs, b/w & colour ills, b/w & colour maps. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Cased, £108.99, €119.95, US$137.99. ISBN: 978-3-11-057036-6. - Volume 69 Issue 1 - Peter Keegan
This chapter is centred on my work as Latin Editor of Mary Hays’s Female Biography, and will explore how a felicitous combination of interdisciplinary approaches to historical research enabled the ventriloquized ‘voices’ of 30 ancient Roman women (from Agrippina the Elder to Veturia). This task has involved a detailed critical annotation in relatio...
Inscriptions in civic, residential and occupational spaces identify the groups which display these relationships: firefighters in Ostia and the Roman capital; apprentices to service in the Palatine palace; and, of course, the servile familia within the households of republican and imperial Rome. This chapter presents a range of formal and informal...
This chapter explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epigraphic spaces — specifically, the accretion of non-official graffiti within the urban fabric of ancient Pompeii between circa 120 BCE and 79 CE. The shift from an-epigraphic cultures to epigraphic cultures is not simply a matter of commissioning the ca...
When one thinks of inscriptions produced under the Roman Empire, public inscribed monuments are likely to come to mind. Hundreds of thousands of such inscriptions are known from across the breadth of the Roman Empire, preserved because they were created of durable material or were reused in subsequent building. This volume looks at another aspect o...
Varro reports that Gaia is ‘celebrated above all other names’ formed from the first or personal name (praenomen) of the husband. Cicero tells us that the use of Gaia as a ‘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 b...
Ancient graffiti - hundreds of thousands of informal, ephemeral texts spanning millennia - offer a patchwork of fragmentary conversations in a variety of languages spread across the Mediterranean world. Cut, painted, inked or traced in charcoal, the surviving graffiti present a layer of lived experience in the ancient world unavailable from other s...
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 i...
Active learning techniques encourage – and even demand – that students become co-creators of their learning. The design of the teaching and learning activities and the assessment tasks requires students to participate in their learning. This guide will help educators move to a more active approach to learning. There are case studies and some excell...
This volume explores the creation of 'written spaces' through the accretion of monumental inscriptions and non-official graffiti in the Latin-speaking West between c.200 BC and AD 300. The shift to an epigraphic culture demonstrates new mentalities regarding the use of language, the relationship between local elites and the population, and between...
The presence of inscriptions in and around cities of the Roman West tests two important boundaries of our modern understanding of what it meant to be a part of an oral-literate society and a participating member of a pervasive epigraphic culture. First, how important it is to recognize the relationship between words and images in ancient urban buil...
This book chapter will consider Roman slavery in relation to the material culture associated with the building on the Palatine hill in Rome generally recognized under the name of ‘Paedagogium’. The first part of this paper will look at the evidence of the numerous graffiti found in the Paedagogium as an index to the culture, educational levels, eth...
This paper explores the creation of localized, elite and non-elite discourses within shared epigraphic spaces – specifically, the accretion of non-official inscriptions within the urban fabric of ancient Pompeii between circa 120 BC and AD 79. The shift from an-epigraphic cultures to epigraphic cultures is not simply a matter of commissioning the c...
While Australian universities offers on-campus students a variety of learning and teaching spaces through which to embed the appropriate range of experiences, the same cannot always be said for distance-education students. This paper will examine the development and delivery of a practical approach to the problem of access as it affects induction a...
Previous research identifies as crucial to successful online learning and teaching (eLT) transformative pedagogical strategies. Transformative L & T is the process by which we call into question our taken-for-granted habits of mind or mindsets to make them more inclusive, discriminating, open and reflective in order to guide our actions. This proce...
This paper discusses the episode in the laudatio 'Turiae' of an elite Roman woman's interaction with the triumuir M. Aemilius Lepidus (LT 2.13-17). Scholarship of the last century has discussed this element of the LT from a variety of standpoints. None of these treatments has approached the description of the experiences and actions of the laudata...
A notice on the late-republican Fasti Antiates Maiores (Q. St. D. F) abbreviates in customary Roman fashion a juxtaposition of civic sacra and human pollution extraordinary to modern eyes. Taking the removal of stercus from the Aedes Vestae on June 15 as a starting-point, I propose to explore the intriguing relationship of human waste with Roman ac...
Ancient graffiti is a paradoxical cultural artefact. On the one hand, it is a spontaneous and
ephemeral figurative and/or textual remainder; on the other, a ubiquitous, trans-historical
discursive phenomenon. No matter what period of human history, no matter which part of
the world, the impulse to leave behind a mark of some kind is easy to trace....
When the teacher of Ancient History in New South Wales first scans the listing of examinable content relating to the Core Unit on the Cities of Vesuvius newly introduced for the 2006 Higher School Certificate, the usefulness of incorporating graffiti into a program of study as one of the range of available sources may not be readily apparent. This...
It is not the purpose of this article to attempt a survey of the history of Rome’s involvement with the island of Britain during the early years of provincial expansion and rebellion. Nor is it my intention to rehearse in detail the background and significant events associated with the 1st century CE female rulers of the Iceni and Brigantes, Boudic...
This paper seeks first to interrogate the way(s) in which two contemporary feminist thinkers (Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray) have appropriated, colonised and reformulated a foundationalist signifying economy (Plato’s philosophy of Forms). I will argue that any verdict on these issues of essentialist and constructivist social history must first ac...
This chapter tests the degree to which the Fasti is immersed in and co-opted by the prevailing masculinist culture of its time, and compares interpretations of modern critics examining Ovid's (re)presentations of women. It finds some colluding with the poet's conservative phallocentric imperatives on ritual(ized) female activity. It contends that t...
Articles cover a variety of periods of prehistory and antiquity − from British Iron Age numismatic iconography to rural and urban pottery production in Byzantine Palestrina/Arabia, from Livy to Apuleius, and Alexander to Agrippina − and showcase recent cutting-edge postgraduate research in the fields of literature and material culture.