9:00-9:15 Introductions

9:15-10:45 Panel 1: Philosophy

Tanner Lyon (The New School for Social Research)
Conflict and Contours: Opposing Drives in Anaximander’s Apeiron and Nietzsche’s Primordial Unity
Elisa Citano (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, RTG)
Traces of Horror Vacui in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Shane Devine (The New School for Social Research)
The Void is the Final Theme of Ontology: Badiou’s Critique of Ancient Materialism

10:45-11:00 Break

11:00-12:30 Panel 2: Production

Isabel Tracy (New York University)
Taming Natural Disasters: Subverting Fear of the Void in The Natural History of Pliny
Justin Lorenzo Biggi (University of Edinburgh)
Publicly Private: Athenian Narratives of Mourning and Loss
Giulia Bertoni (Columbia University)
Drapery on Roman sarcophagi: between pathos and filler

12:30-2:00 Lunch Break

2:00-3:30 Panel 3: Place

Keegan J. Valbuena (Princeton University)
Horror Vacui and Oblative Signs in Roman Republican Augury
Johnathan Hardy (University of Minnesota - Twin Cities)
The Imperial Eye: A GIS Based Approach to the Panoptic Design of the Sasanian City of Ardašīr-Xwarrah, Iran
Joseph Carrino (University of Cambridge)
Agrimensura: Land Divisions in Roman Veteran Colonies

3:30-4:00 Break

4:00 Keynote

Professor Amy Russell (Brown University)
“On the ‘Emptiness’ of Space”

This paper discusses how space was produced in the ancient world, focusing on the Roman example but drawing on comparative evidence for other societies including Han China. I use Yi-fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place to consider conceptions of space as empty. Is space a void, a blank stage on which humans build the places they inhabit? Or is it always already full of meaning? I argue that for Romans meaningful, cluttered place should be understood as prior to empty, logical space. It was the void that required construction, whether through the partitions drawn by augurs and agrimensores or the thoughtworlds of philosophers. The same process of constructing emptiness can be seen in other cultural fields too, from historiography to aesthetics.