Alex McAuley
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
alexander.mcauley@mcgill.ca
Length: 20 mins (or 10 minutes, if you prefer)
Seeing Through the Gendered Fog:
Digital Approaches to Identifying Ancient Women
While digital tools have been invaluable both to my own genealogical projects and ancient
prosopography writ large, we have yet to develop a method of overcoming the invisibility of ancient
women in our varied source material. As an unintended consequence of this, the vast majority of Digital
Humanities projects in Classics and Ancient History have leaned inadvertently towards the male:
prosopographies, encyclopaedias, even literary analyses on the web overwhelmingly discuss male
subjects, for lack of any other seemingly viable option.
But this need not necessarily be the case, and my aim in this paper to introduce a conceptual
approach and prospective methodology for bringing otherwise invisible ancient women into the
scholarly limelight through digital means. Though their traces are hardly as concrete as their male
counterparts, this is not to say that they cannot be found: working through incomplete genealogical
charts and tracing paths of heredity can lead us towards ancient women who otherwise would have
slipped beneath the scholarly radar. Identifying them through genealogical databases, and then
combining this with geospatial mapping (Inspired by the McGill IOWC project) of their times and
locations can bring ancient social networks to the fore – networks that were forged and maintained by
the marriages and issue of ancient women. In this instance I will take the Seleucid Dynasty in the
Hellenistic Near East as a case study, though the method and approach could just as easily have a much
wider historical application.
Bio:
After working as the Director of Sales for a Montreal-based web and graphic design firm (The
Message Studios), Alex McAuley then dove into the world of academia with a Masters in Classics at the
University of Edinburgh, before returning to Quebec to pursue his PhD in Ancient History, on which he
continues to labour. Apart from his principal research interest of ethnicity and pluralism in the
Hellenistic World, he is the primary author and editor of the ongoing Seleucid Genealogy project, and
has several published and forthcoming articles in the fields of Seleucid dynastic history, Hellenistic
royal women, Greek federalism, and the reception of the ancient world in film and television series.