The Classical Studies Department at the University of Waterloo is home to a vibrant and active community of scholars whose research explores the languages, histories, and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. Through the Waterloo Institute for Hellenistic Studies (WIHS), faculty, students, and collaborators engage in international dialogue on the Hellenistic and Roman eras — a period marked by extraordinary cultural exchange, political innovation, and intellectual creativity.
This page showcases publications emerging from WIHS research initiatives, edited volumes, and partnerships with global scholars and presses. Each title reflects the Institute’s ongoing commitment to advancing the study of the ancient world through collaborative, interdisciplinary scholarship that connects past and present. Here, you can explore the work that continues to make Hellenistic studies at Waterloo lively, relevant, and internationally recognized.
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.
View More Details About This Book | Access Publisher Page (De Gruyter)
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 · 708 pp.
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.
View More Details About This Book | Access Publisher Page (University of Toronto Press)