Sir Charles Nicholson Lecture 2023
The 2023 Sir Charles Nicholson Lecture presents the journey of an interdisciplinary research and engagement project focused on tracing insular identities of the large islands of the Mediterranean, particularly Cyprus, Sardinia and Crete. These three islands are notable for their size and having borne witness to strong indigenous cultural traditions. They have demonstrated complex transitions between prehistoric to historic cultures and significant restructuring of their social and political systems, tied in various ways to wider developments in the Mediterranean region.
Issues of cultural interaction, hybridisation and migration are central to the identity of these islands from early antiquity to the present day. For this reason, Dr Christophilopoulou applied an archaeological, ecological and social anthropological lens to the surviving evidence.
This lecture will coincide with the Chau Chak Wing Museum’s exhibition, ‘Tidal Kin: Stories from the Pacific’, which reveals ancestral stories of Australia’s closest island neighbours, to comparatively re-think notions of insularity, connectivity and migration across island cultures.
About the 2023 Sir Charles Nicholson Lecturer
Dr Anastasia Christophilopoulou is the Curator of Greece, Rome and Cyprus at the Department of Antiquities of the Fitzwilliam Museum (Senior Assistant Keeper). She is responsible for research and exhibition projects and permanent displays in the fields of Greek, Cypriot and Roman collections. Anastasia’s core research interests are in the archaeology of the Aegean Bronze and Iron Age cultures, the archaeology of the Mediterranean islands and the archaeology of Cyprus. She is currently leading the research project ‘Being an Islander’: Art and Identity of the large Mediterranean Islands, (2019-2023).
Header image: Head of a male figure, Cyprus, date unknown, Nicholson Collection. Head of a male figure, Cyrpus, Hellenistic, c. 300-50 BC, provenance unknown, donated by James Stewart before 1962, Nicholson Collection. Head of a male figure, Cyprus, date unknown, Nicholson Collection.