Research and Teaching

CRASIS is the interdisciplinary research network for the study of the ancient world at the University of Groningen. We bring together scholars across fields—from history and archaeology to literature, religion, and material culture—through a rich programme of events and initiatives that support dialogue and collaboration.

Our core activities include:

• Monthly Ancient World Seminars (AWS): These public lectures, held throughout the academic year, feature national and international scholars presenting current research on ancient cultures, empires, religions, and societies. For upcoming seminars, see our Events Calendar.

• CRASIS-Funded Independent Workshops: Scholars affiliated with CRASIS may apply for funding to organise thematic workshops that explore focused questions in ancient world studies. These workshops bring together researchers across disciplines and institutions.

• CRASIS Network Events: We also support smaller collaborative gatherings, including reading groups, exploratory meetings, and informal symposia designed to grow interdisciplinary exchange.

In addition to supporting research, CRASIS is actively involved in university teaching. Our members contribute to several BA and MA programmes, and we work to integrate ancient world studies into classroom learning. Learn more about how we connect research with education on our Education sub-page.

Whether you're a student, early career researcher, or senior scholar, CRASIS provides a vibrant platform for thinking about the ancient world—its texts, objects, people, and ideas.

Upcoming Events

Network Time and Temporalities - International Workshop: Religious Temporalities and the Ancient City

Time: 15–16 May 2025

Location: Doopsgezindekerk, Groningen

Ancient cities brought together a plurality of time systems such as calendars, shared rhythms and routines, narratives of the past and future, mixing the quotidian with the profound in a spatio-temporal continuum. Religion is at the crossroads of many of these urban temporalities. Rituals regulated the days, months, and seasons of human time, with transregional ‘panhellenic’ festivals synchronizing cities across the Mediterranean. Yet festivals also had a transcendent capacity of lifting the individual out of the everyday, creating ‘atemporal’ spaces in the city, but especially ‘atemporal’ communities that extended beyond the boundaries of the living and the dead. Who belonged to these temporal communities? Where were their timescapes located, how did they shape urban space? Which religious temporalities outlined the contours of civic identity?

This workshop brings together scholars from across the world, and at different career stages, to focus on the role of religion and time in creating a multivalent sense of the city.

For full programme, please see website religioustemporalities.wordpress.com, for more information about the network please click here.

Network Marginalised Peoples - Interdisciplinary Approaches to Marginalised Peoples in the Ancient World: Women and Children

Time: 9th May 2025

Location: Tammeszaal (floor 4, University Library, Broerstraat 4)

The study of ancient society in the classical world has traditionally focused on the urban elites or the male citizens, and has neglected the women, the children or adolescents, the old people, the disabled or sick, the enslaved and criminals, the foreign residents. This workshop aims to address this problem by tackling the topics of women and children (with a plan to have future workshops on the other groups). While the situation is rapidly changing, with these groups receiving increasing attention, these discussions remain restricted to historical or literary evidence.

However, in recent years, mortuary archaeology (the study of mortuary practices) and bioarchaeology (the study of human remains, and associated analytical techniques such as ancient DNA and biodistance analysis to establish genetic relations, or isotopic analyses to reconstruct diet or provenance) produce fascinating insights into the life and death of precisely these neglected categories. These new insights have not been incorporated so far into historical reflection on these ‘silenced groups’. Classicists and ancient historians make little use of (bio)archaeological information, while (bio)archaeologists are not always familiar with the complexities of the ancient world, or ignore the potential of texts, epigraphy, or imagery. As a result, the different disciplines hardly interact with each other, at a time when new questions are being asked and new methods introduced. This workshop is an opportunity to bring together scholars from across the disciplines studying the ancient world, bridging the gap between these diverse disciplines and between the humanities and the sciences.

This workshop is supported by ARCHON and OIKOS (see the ARCHON website for information about credits and assessment).

Register here.