Alexis Q. Castor will give the MA Student Brown Bag Lunch presentation on Monday, April 16, at 12:15 pm. Her talk is entitled “Looking at Lionesses: Macedonian Courts and Jewelry in the Fourth and Third Centuries BCE.”

Lion-head earrings and necklaces became popular in Macedonia in the late fourth century and developed into popular ornament types found throughout the Hellenistic world. This powerful imagery is unusual for women’s jewelry at this time, but lions are popular in contemporary masculine material culture. In this talk Castor will explore issues concerning elite status and gender roles in a period during which the Macedonian court saw tremendous changes in its local and global identity.

Alexis Q. Castor is Associate Professor of Classics at Franklin & Marshall College. Her research interests focus on how Greek and Etruscan elite classes in general, and women in particular, used jewelry to express their status. She is preparing a monograph-length study that investigates the ways that men and women wore jewelry in Greece and Italy, Jewelry in Greece and Eturia (900-200 BCE): A Social History.

The MA Student Brown Bag Lunch series is an annual invitation extended by the graduating MA class to a speaker of their choosing.