Dear Airudites, It is my pleasure to announce our upcoming workshop that intends to put surveillance in a greater historical context while also interrogating its various incarnations in religious and more secular contexts. Happy weekend! Seda and Tudor Sala Surveillant Antiquities and Modern Transparencies: Exercising and Resisting Surveillance Then and Now 19th October, 2015 Berlin, Germany Intelligent drones, microscopic tracking devices, brain scanners: seemingly unlimited technological possibilities make surveillance appear a thing of the future. Edward Snowden’s recent disclosures and bleak predictions about comprehensive spying in an age of electronic communication only increased public anxieties about surveillance in the now and in the tomorrow. Yet centuries, if not millennia, before the surveillance apocalypse of the twenty-first century, various models of social and individual transparency were evident in writings and architecture from ancient Mesopotamia to early medieval China and from classical India to the late antique Mediterranean world. Total surveillance—whether as ideal or nightmare, whether as theory or practice, whether as tradition or innovation—is by no means a contrivance of the present or the near future, but rather a construction of the distant past. The workshop will shed light on the complex practices, strategies, and imaginaires of total surveillance, both familiar and less well known, in the ancient and late ancient worlds. We will explore ancient forms of information mediation and centralization, the employment of record keeping and accounting, technologies of self-discipline, and the strategic use of architecture and the organization of space, while drawing also on notions of all-seeing gods and demonic beings and of sin and pollution, as well as on practices of purification or expiation, divination, ordeals, and omens. Using this historical knowledge, the workshop intends to turn the gaze back upon the present-day surveillance complex, discerning in the lofty and imperturbable lenses that surround us reflections of age-old struggles, resistances, and failures. 19.10.2015 09:00 - 09:20 Introductions Seda Gürses – Princeton University, New Jersey, USA Tudor Sala – Institut für Religionswissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin 09:20 - 09:50 Walls, Lists, and Policemen: How Efficient was the Control of the Royal Necropolis during the New Kingdom (1550–1050 BC)? Andreas Dorn – Ägyptisches Museum, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn 09:50 - 10:20 Ideology and Practice of Surveillance in Ancient China: The Establishment of the Imperial Secretariat in Imperial China Dennis Schilling – Institut für Sinologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 10:20 - 10:50 Looking Right: Community Surveillance, Women, Sex, and Social Control in Ancient Rome Rebecca Langlands – Classics and Ancient History, University of Exeter, United Kingdom 10:50 - 11:15 Coffee Break 11:15 - 11:45 Monastic Discernment and Divine Judgment: Dynamics of Surveillance behind the Apocalypse of Paul Emiliano Fiori – Lehrstuhl für Ältere Kirchengeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 11:45 - 12:15 Surveilled Women: Female Crime and Female Confinement in Late Antiquity Julia Hillner – Department of History, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom 12:15 - 12:45 The Intimate Surveillance of Calvinists in Reformation France Graeme Murdock – Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland 12:45 - 14:00 Lunch Break 14:00 - 14:45 Surveillance in the Formative Period of Islam: A Comparative Intellectual Historical Exploration Mohammad Mahdi Mojahedi – Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin 14:45 - 15:15 The Industrialization of Surveillance and the Limits of Community and Social Interaction Theories Jörg Pohle – Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft 15:15 - 15:45 The Rise of Preemptive Surveillance of Children in England and Wales: Social and Ethical Consequences Rosamunde Van Brakel – Law, Science, Technology & Society Studies , Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium 15:45 - 16:15 Coffee Break 16:15 - 17:15 Scientia potestas est: A Knowledge-Centric Analysis of (and Apologia for?) State Surveillance in the Early Roman Empire Keynote Address Christopher Fuhrmann – Department of History, University of North Texas, USA 17:15 - 18:00 Round Table 19:00 - 20:30 Dinner For further information please visit http://www.topoi.org/event/31612/