Color & Identity in the Ancient World

Color has always been essential to both life and art. How could some colors be lost over time, and what are the textual and visual clues for reconstructing them? What role did color play in constructing and (re)presenting identity?

This program explores the connections between color, emotion, and identity in the ancient world.

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS

Rosanne Liebermann is the Friedman Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitic Philology from Johns Hopkins University in 2019. Her research is on how the book of Ezekiel uses body imagery to construct Judean identity.

Michele Asuni is a doctoral candidate in Classics at Johns Hopkins University. His research explores the aesthetics of color in ancient Greece, with a particular focus on the relationship between color, affect and emotion in Greek culture.

FEELING BLUE: Israel, Assyria, and the History of a Color

Presented by Rosanne Liebermann

Bibliography

Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color (New York: Penguin, 2016)
Shiyanthi Thavapalan, The Missing Shade of Blue, ANE Today VI/2 (2018)
Shiyanthi Thavapalan, The Meaning of Color in Ancient Mesopotamia (Leiden: Brill, 2019)
David A. Warburton, Ancient Color Categories, pp. 24-31 in Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology (Ed. Ronnier Luo; New York: Springer, 2016)
Irving Ziderman, First Identification of Authentic Tekelet, BASOR 265 (1987): 25–33.

Credits

This program was co-hosted by the Society of Design Arts (SoDA) and AIGA Baltimore.

Richard StanleyJune 3, 2020