Lindsey Mazurek is an assistant professor of classical studies in the College of Arts + Sciences at IU Bloomington. A scholar of the Roman Empire, she focuses on questions of ethnicity, religion, landscape, and change in the Roman provinces. Central to her work is the exploration of how the inhabitants of Rome’s provinces reconfigured their own ideas of themselves and their world in response to Roman rule. Her first book, Isis in a Global Empire: Greek Identity Through Egyptian Religion in Roman Greece (Cambridge University Press 2022, winner of the 2023 First Book Award from CAMWS) looks at the worship of Egyptian deities like Isis, Sarapis, and Anubis in Greece during the Roman period and examines how local devotees reconfigured traditional ideas about Greekness in response to their religious practices. She is also the editor of multiple volumes focused on landscape and migration in the ancient world.
During her fellowship, Professor Mazurek will work on her second monograph, Portraits Behaving Badly: The Agency of Portraiture in Roman Greece, which examines how the role of portraiture in ancient Greek society changed under Roman rule. Bringing together literature, inscriptions, sculptures, and architecture, this book argues for a new, less rational and political reading of ancient portrait sculptures. Portraits, in this colonial context, could push on boundaries that divided human and divine, past and present, truth and fiction. The book also integrates examples of portrait displays from regions often left out of traditional discussions of Greek portraiture like Macedonia, western Thrace, and Epirus. Bringing these well-preserved examples of portraits into dialogue with the canon of Greek portraiture allows us to consider issues of regionalism and historicity and recognize the many different kinds of work that portraits performed in Roman Greece.
The IU Presidential Arts and Humanities Fellowship will allow Mazurek to optimize her 2026-27 sabbatical and receive promotion in a timely manner. She plans to use part of the fellowship year to pursue major external grants to support the completion of her book.