MANTO @ Macquarie
Written by Greta Hawes
I was delighted to receive news last year that I had been awarded a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. This means that, over the next 8 years, I’ll be working on a project that investigates how communal crises impacted Greek mythic storytelling and how narratives could function as strategies for resilience in the face of natural disasters, epidemics, migration and war.
With this project, I want to go beyond the well-known storytelling cities of antiquity (Athens and Thebes come quickly to mind!) to delve into what was happening in smaller communities and further-flung places. But of course, these are exactly the kinds of places that didn’t tend to make much on an impact on our surviving sources. So, I’m going to further develop a technique I have been playing with for a while, where I collate information about many communities facing similar crises, and look for patterns in this data. (I wrote a blog here about using this approach to understand myths imposed on ruined cities in Imperial Greece.)
MANTO will be central to this research. The project now has a home at Macquarie’s Department of History and Archaeology. There I'm keen to keep expanding MANTO’s coverage of literary sources for myth, but also to branch out and capture the important mythic data that comes to us by way of material and visual artefacts — art, coins, epigraphy etc. In a couple of years I’ll be offering a couple of funded PhD places, and I’ll also be looking for some fractional post-docs as well. This coming semester I’m looking forward to taking on a new cohort of interns through Macquarie’s PACE programme.
I’m hoping that there are about a half-dozen commited, curious students in AHIS3005 who would like to work with me to capture data from geographical texts (we’re going to work with the American team to tackle Strabo). We will also work to improve linked open data resources for ancient world studies by aligning MANTO’s data to Pleiades and Wikidata.
All training will be provided. Priority will be given to candidates with previous experience in ancient literature in translation, Greek myth, and Mediterranean geography. Prior understanding of the principles of linked open data (LOD) would be beneficial. We will meet fortnightly on campus during the semester (likely Tuesdays 10-12) and also via Zoom (likely Thursday mornings).
Image above: Sphinx’s head in profile, drawn by Allina Podgurski, after a dish (c. 600BCE) found at Kameiros, Rhodes and now in the Louvre (A308)