Patricia Eunji Kim

This article reassesses the so-called Nereid Monument (ca 380 BCE) at Xanthos in Lycia by focusing on the narrative and symbolic role of female figures within its sculptural programme. Constructed as the tomb for the Lycian dynast Erbbina, the monument has been noted for its over-human-size sculpture of Nereids, its historicising city-siege reliefs, as well as its spectacular fusion of visual and architectural styles, motifs and themes from various contexts throughout the Aegean and Anatolia. Building on this scholarship, I turn specifically to the monument's innovative representations of non-mythological women in prominent areas of its visual programme: Erbbina's dynastic consort and a distressed woman who is caught in the throes of military violence. By focusing on the role of female bodies in Erbbina's funerary qua triumphal monument, I argue for the important narrative function of female bodies in articulating dynastic legitimacy and continuity. Finally, this article comments on the importance of femininity in addition to masculinity in dynastic expressions in the fourth century, thus anticipating major art-historical changes in the art of power at the beginning of the Hellenistic period.

“Monumental Presence and Absence: Approaching the Material Traces of Historical Women in the Classical World”. In Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome, eds. Megan Elena Bowen, Mary Hamil Gilbert, and Edith Gwendolyn Nally. Intersectionality in Classical Antiquity Series. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 102-20.

This paper engages with intersectional feminist theory to explore how Vitruvius’s story about the Carian queen Artemisia II in Book 2 of De Architectura illuminates first-century B.C.E. Roman attitudes of hostility towards non-Roman women in spaces of political power—especially given what would have been the recent defeat of the Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII. The paper has two goals: first, I argue that first-century B.C.E. accounts of queen ship configure Artemisia and Cleopatra as raced and gendered embodiments of opposition to the idealized image of Roman imperial masculinity. Second, I demonstrate how race-oriented feminist frameworks can productively bear on historical analyses and classical studies.

This article analyzes two distinct bronze sculptural monuments, one from the fourth-century BCE Mediter-ranean and the other from present-day South Korea, to examine how the politics of gender and difference shape heritage and heritage work. Although different in historical and geographic contexts, the monuments both represent women whose gendered and ethnic differences were mobilized by opposing political actors first to justify the violence enacted against them and then to contain or cover their monuments to engender what I call "carceral heritage"-heritage that is physically and symbolically policed by historical powerholders. [intersectionality, public art, embodiment, Classics, Korea, incarceration]