The Marco Symposium is the Institute’s premier annual event, and is held every year in March or April. The Symposium brings leading experts in their field to the University of Tennessee for two days of talks on that year’s theme, and concludes with a roundtable discussion by all the participants. The topic of the 20th annual Marco Symposium is Local and Global Perspectives on Materiality in the Premodern World, organized by Stephen Collins-Elliott (Classics) and Megan Bryson (Religious Studies).

This year’s Symposium explores different definitions of materiality and objecthood, developing a new vocabulary of understanding in local and global perspectives in the premodern world from antiquity to the early modern period. Presentations examine object-driven narratives through multidisciplinary case-studies, asking how our understanding of the past changes when we treat human relationships as entangled with objects. More specifically, this symposium aims to bridge disparate contexts by drawing together the ways in which local societies have approached their material entanglements, toward highlighting how each case-study can inform new theoretical positions and methodological approaches toward our understanding other past contexts.