The Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies (WIHS) is an international research institute dedicated to the study of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, broadly conceived across the Mediterranean, Near East, and beyond. Founded to foster collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship, WIHS brings together scholars, students, and institutions from around the world to explore a period defined by cultural connectivity, political transformation, and intellectual innovation.
This page highlights publications produced by scholars affiliated with WIHS, including research initiatives, edited volumes, and collaborative projects developed in partnership with leading international scholars and academic presses. Each work reflects the Institute’s commitment to advancing the study of antiquity through sustained collaboration, methodological diversity, and global scholarly exchange. Together, these publications showcase the vitality and contemporary relevance of Hellenistic studies as a dynamic and evolving field of research.
Power, Royal Agency, and Elite Women in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
Guest Editors: Sheila Ager, Monica D’Agostini, Alex McAuley
Ancient History Bulletin, Volume 38, Numbers 3–4 — 2024.
This special issue of Ancient History Bulletin presents selected outcomes of the distributed conference project Power, Royal Agency, and Elite Women in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (PRAEW), whose online sessions ran from September 2021 to May 2022. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the project used a shared “distributed” format to foster sustained discussion and comparative reflection across the Hellenistic and Roman worlds.
The contributions gathered here examine how elite women’s authority and influence operated within broader structures of power—moving beyond purely biographical approaches to ask how “power” and “agency” were conceptualized, negotiated, and represented across different places, genres, institutions, and historical contexts. The issue advances current debates on royal and elite women by foregrounding methodological clarity and cross-period perspective.
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Localism in Hellenistic Greece
Editors: Sheila Ager, Hans Beck
University of Toronto Press — 2023
Localism in Hellenistic Greece examines how communities in central Greece and the Peloponnese understood and asserted local identity in an age of expanding political power, cultural exchange, and connectivity. Challenging assumptions that mainland Greece was marginal or left behind in the Hellenistic period, this volume shows how local traditions, memories, and social practices remained powerful frameworks for meaning-making amid wider Mediterranean transformations.
Drawing on concepts of locality, boundedness, and local discourse, the contributors explore how poleis and ethnē responded to changing horizons through civic institutions, landscape, ritual, memory, and self-representation. Case studies range from Thessaly and Chaironeia to Sparta and Mani, revealing how local identities were actively shaped, contested, and renewed rather than eroded by broader Hellenistic forces.
By foregrounding lived experience and small-scale communities, the volume offers a nuanced perspective on cultural connectivity, demonstrating how the local and the global operated in constant dialogue. Localism in Hellenistic Greece makes a significant contribution to debates on identity, power, and community in the ancient Mediterranean.
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Comparing Roman Hellenisms in Italy
Editors: Basil Dufallo, Dr. Riemer A. Faber
University of Michigan Press — 2023.
Comparing Roman Hellenisms in Italy offers the first sustained, comparative investigation of Roman Hellenism as a diverse and locally inflected phenomenon. Rather than treating Rome’s engagement with Greek culture as a linear or steadily “improving” process, the volume challenges assumptions of continuity by emphasizing variation, contingency, and historical specificity.
Focusing on Italy—where abundant archaeological, artistic, and literary evidence survives—the essays examine how Greek culture was selectively adopted, adapted, and reinterpreted across different Roman contexts, from architecture and sculpture to poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. Contributors show that Roman Hellenism was often strategic and decentralized, shaped by local agents, materials, and aesthetic traditions as much as by Rome itself.
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Celebrity, Fame, and Infamy in the Hellenistic World
Editor: Dr. Riemer Faber
University of Toronto Press, Toronto — 2020.
This collection traces how ancient practices of publicity forged durable models of “being known.” Through coins, inscriptions, literature, visual culture, and performance, the essays chart strategies of self-promotion and forms of reputational control—from royal pageantry and urban spectacles to rumor, satire, and damnatio memoriae. Case studies range from Cleopatra and Alexander to poets, officials, and historians, revealing how mobility, networks, and media circulated images of persons across the Mediterranean and fixed them in cultural memory.
By situating Hellenistic notoriety within the social and political systems that rewarded renown or punished transgression, the volume shows how public personas were fashioned, contested, and remediated over time. It offers a fresh genealogy for modern celebrity: ancient technologies of attention—festival display, minted icons, statues, chronicles, and gossip—produced recognizable “brands” whose afterlives shaped later antiquity and beyond.
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Seleukid Royal Women: Creation, Representation and Distortion of Hellenistic Queenship in the Seleukid Empire
Editors: Dr. Altay Coşkun, Dr. Alex McAuley
Franz Steiner Verlag (Historia Einzelschriften 240) — 2017
This landmark volume is the first to focus specifically on Seleukid royal women and the many ways queenship was created, represented, and contested across the Seleukid Empire and its client kingdoms. Bringing together sixteen scholars, the essays examine how women of the dynasty shaped prestige, diplomacy, and dynastic legitimacy within an empire spanning dozens of cultures and languages—from western Asia Minor to Central Asia.
Across literary, epigraphic, and visual evidence, contributors trace both the visibility and distortion of royal women in ancient sources, while situating Seleukid queenship within broader traditions from Persia, Bactria, Judaea, and the Hellenistic Mediterranean. The result is a foundational resource for understanding gender, power, and political culture in the Hellenistic world.
The Reception of the Homeric Hymns
Editors: Andrew Faulkner, Athanassios Vergados, Andreas Schwab
Oxford University Press — 2016
This volume offers the first comprehensive study of the reception of the Homeric Hymns from the late Hellenistic period onward, tracing their influence across Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and early modern literary traditions. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the essays explore how the Hymns were read, adapted, and reinterpreted in a wide range of cultural, intellectual, and artistic contexts.
Moving beyond their archaic origins, the contributors examine the afterlives of the Hymns in Latin poetry, imperial and late antique literature, Byzantine scholarship, Renaissance humanism, and modern literary traditions. The result is a foundational resource for understanding the enduring cultural legacy of the Homeric Hymns and their role in shaping literary, religious, and aesthetic discourse across centuries.
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Interconnectivity in the Mediterranean and Pontic World during the Hellenistic and Roman Periods
Editors: Dr. Victor Cojocaru, Dr. Altay Coşkun, Dr. Mădălina Dana
MEGA Publishing House, Cluj-Napoca — 2014
Bringing together twenty-eight essays by an international team of specialists, this proceedings volume charts the dense political, economic, religious, and cultural networks that linked the Black Sea to the wider Mediterranean. Contributors probe the mechanics of mobility—of people, ideas, cults, and artistic traditions—while tracking how identities and geopolitical realities were reshaped across these interconnected regions. Case studies move from local responses to empire to the integration of port cities into commercial systems, and from diplomatic practice and migration to epigraphic, numismatic, and archaeological evidence for cross-regional exchange.
The result is both a comprehensive reference work for the Black Sea and adjacent territories and a methodological platform for studying interregional connectivity. By situating the Pontic world within broader Mediterranean currents, the book illuminates how enduring ties, shifting borders, and competing hegemonies created a shared yet contested space from the Hellenistic kingdoms into the Roman imperial order.
Belonging and Isolation in the Hellenistic World
Editors: Dr. Sheila Ager, Dr. Riemer Faber
University of Toronto Press, Toronto — 2013
How did people in the Hellenistic age imagine community while negotiating distance, diversity, and empire? This wide-ranging volume explores the paradoxes of a cosmopolitan world that also produced sharp boundaries. Essays examine the lived experience of the oikoumenē through literature, history, religion, visual culture, economy, and diplomacy, uncovering the practices that created inclusion—ritual, civic institutions, kinship fictions, shared memory—as well as the mechanisms that enforced exclusion and marginality.
Organized around intercultural poetics and ethnicity, Mediterranean systems and networks (symplokē), Alexandria as an inventive hub, social in-groups/out-groups, and the geopolitics and “geopoetics” of islands, the volume maps the tensions and opportunities of life around the Hellenistic Mediterranean. It offers a synthetic portrait of how belonging was articulated and how isolation—chosen or imposed—shaped identities from Asia Minor to the Levant and from the Aegean to the western sea.
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