Giulia Pedrucci is going to present a working paper on 'Epistemological and Methodological Reflections on the Study of Religions, Gender, and Women. Demeter and Kore/Persephone: The mother-daughter relationship as a fruitful case study'

Through an approach that combines the academic study of religions with motherhood studies, this paper examines rarely considered maternal aspects of Demeter, a goddess of the pantheon of ancient Greek religion. We first discuss which theoretical inputs and categories of maternal theory are relevant to uncover innovative lines of research on religious representations and practices in polytheistic systems of the past, thus also contributing to broader epistemological reflections in the history and study of religions. Then, considering the Homeric Hymn as well as key ritual elements of the Thesmophoria festival through the lenses of maternal theory, we examine the mother-daughter relationship and place emphasis on the role of the mother as maternal trainer. This concrete case study from the ancient Greek world demonstrates the relevance for historians of religions of considering past polytheistic systems while harnessing the fruitful interdisciplinary potential of maternal theory.

Marialilia Cavallaro presents a working paper on 'The Shapes of Spartan Identities in the Traditions of Ritual Practices for Apollo'

The paper reprises one of the main points of my research in Greek history, aiming to underline the plurality of identities in the Greek societies. It is a kind of discussion that tries to show the very contemporary aspects of the research on ancient History, through an anthropological reflection on social behaviors which involves the relationship between religion and politics. Focusing the attention on religious aspects, I intend to analyze a kind of identity that is not necessarily connected with a principle of territoriality, pertaining to the modern so-called “liquid identities”, but that is no less founded on a strong roots of cultural belonging and social identification. 

The discourse on the forms of reception of the divine figure of Apollo, within cults and Greek festivals, finds in celebrations of the Dorian area a fundamental reference to understand the most archaic phases of the cults for the god. The study of the so-called "Dorian area" allows us to investigate a cultural dimension that is not spatially circumscribed but rather composite, specially on social level. If plural dimensions that cross the boundaries of territoriality were recognized from the Greeks by the time of the first colonization (VIIIth century), in the case of the Dorian Migrants, however, the original divergence of the relationship between ethnos and territory assigned to the identity's discussion a central importance: both within the formation of the individual Dorian communities of the archaic age, and, subsequently, with the establishment of the balance of power among the Greek poleis. 

The Spartan festivals preserved very ancient traces of this process of construction and acquisition of identity, that, conveyed by means of religious practices, intended to obtain the fundamental response through the participation of the politai, true agents of the identity. 

At the center of the narrative on the invention of a Spartan tradition it is possible to observe the figure of Dorian Apollo, as a god on which were founded the roots of the Dorian-Spartan community, both on a politic dimension and on a religious agency.

Richard Gordon presents a working paper on "The Greeks, religion and nature in German neo-humanist discourse from Romanticism to Reichsgründung"

This paper is part of a larger study devoted to the representations of ancient Greek religion in German neo-humanist scholarship, 1750-1914. The sub-topic here is that of Nature. Rather than focusing on the physicalist interpretation of the Greek gods, which is a major theme in the literature, I seek to locate shifts in the conceptions of nature in German scholarship on Greek religion from the later eighteenth century to c.1870 against the background of the modernisation of the German university system(s), the debate over Fr. Creuzer in th 1810-20s, the rise of pseudo-historicism, the failure of 1848 and emergent industrialisation.