Search Results

We are looking for experienced and passionate educators for a paid role during the summer! SASA (Save Ancient Studies Alliance) have received a generous grant of $10,000 from the Delmas Foundation to support our Summer Mini-Reading Groups. These Reading Groups are free to participants, and are hosted on Zoom. We want to make these groups as widely accessible as possible to ensure we are maintaining a minimal barrier to entry within Ancient Studies, and offering alternative, non-traditional venues of getting involved with scholarship! SASA’s Text-in-Translation Reading Groups are small, informal discussion groups, centered on ancient texts. Each Reading Group is designed by its Group Leader. The general format of a Reading Group is that the Group Leader gives the participants in advance part of a translated text to prepare for discussion. At the weekly sessions, the Group Leader leads the discussion and may also spend some time explaining various points related to the text to provide context for the discussion. The feedback from our previous Reading Groups has been incredible, with both Group Leaders and participants providing resoundingly positive feedback. As such, we are keen to offer an expanded version of this opportunity as we develop our Reading Group programme into the summer. To fulfil this, we are looking for dedicated and passionate academics to lead 3 and 8 week reading groups with SASA. The responsibilities of the role are outlined as follows; Design a course of study for a number of weeks Create and curate a Live Syllabus Send preparation materials to students in advance of each session Lead the discussion sessions To get an idea of the topics we’ve tackled in the past - no matter how niche or specialist - please take a look at our previous reading group workshops and get an idea as to whether there is a topical niche that you’d like to fill! We are taking applications till May 15th, and would love to hear from any academics with the necessary experience and passion to curate a live curriculum for these Reading Groups. For more information, check out the flier for the full job specification here.

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) is pleased to announce that we have a number of Volunteer and Intern Positions opening over the Summer period. These posts are a fantastic way of getting involved with a vibrant educational community and outreach-oriented non-profit in the Ancient Studies sector, and can also qualify as college credits for those in full-time study. SASA is looking for people from all kinds of backgrounds, who are interested in growing, developing their skills, and making a difference. We enjoy working together with like-minded individuals from around the world, who believe in SASA’s mission - to raise awareness of the Downward Trend and work to counteract it. SASA aims to inspire a broad, inclusive community of learners and students by building a grassroots movement through outreach, collaboration, accessibility, and public scholarship. These positions are diverse and incorporate a range of different skill sets. For more information, please click on the specific position linked here: Internship Brochure Inspire Team Leader CASO Coordinator Social Media Editor Assistant Manager for Communications/Live Events Programming Coordinator Donor Program Assistant Video Editor Graphic Designer Applications are on a rolling basis. Click here to apply and direct any questions to daviddanzig@saveancientstudies.org.

SASA presents “Let’s Get Published”, a Work-in-Progress Forum for independent Scholars and Researchers! These are a collection of monthly informal gatherings aimed at independent scholars, researchers, and students, to offer them a comfortable forum to present recent research and receive feedback from an audience of like-minded peers and allow for engagement with current research. These meetings will be an hour long, held in a closed Zoom call, free for anyone who RSVPs to the event via our events page (linked here). Each meeting will include a 10 minute icebreaker followed by 5 10 minute slots within which a scholar or student will: Present the general idea of their Work-in-Progress (1 min) Present the specific area on which they have been working recently (3 mins) Pose one or two questions to the audience for feedback (1 min) Receive feedback from the audience (5 mins) Our upcoming meeting dates are: Sunday, March 20, 2022, 12:00pm - 1:00pm EST Sunday, April 17, 2022, 12:00pm - 1:00pm EST Sunday, May 22, 2022, 12:00pm - 1:00pm EST Sunday, June 19, 2022, 12:00pm - 1:00pm EST To apply to present at a “Let’s Get Published” meeting, please check out the form for more information (linked here).

On March 12th, come watch a live presentation of one of our volunteers, Alfie Garland, at this year’s Graduate Archaeology (Oxford) Conference. Alfie will be delivering a paper about his Master’s Thesis research: “What came first, the Phoenician or the Egg? Examining the geographic distribution and artistic evolution of Decorated Ostrich Eggs in the Mediterranean Iron Age”. This talk will be taking place at 14:20 on March 12th, and will be a part of day two of a three-day event offered by Oxford. Each day has a corresponding theme - Day 1 focuses on production, 2 on Transmission, and 3 on reception. For further information on the conference, themes, and other talks, please check out the promotional material here. To watch the conference online, access the Zoom link below, with password “Gao2022”! https://us02web.zoom.us/j/77724876820?pwd=Y_-IOr-SOyDBtgFk4o_gAjzRFpX00rz.1

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) is delighted to announce our latest partnership with Travelusion. Travelusion is a UK-based Archaeotouring Company that focuses on providing high-quality hybrid tours to a range of sites in the UK and internationally. Their work has taken them to sites of historic importance and interest across the globe, and we are delighted to be partnering with them to promote some of their upcoming tours! We are excited to announce three free live archaeotours this March with Travelusion at historic sites in the UK - Hyde Abbey, Southampton City Walls, and Fishbourne Roman Palace. Join our fantastic professional tour guide, Dr. Lillian Cespedes Gonzales, as she leads you through the living and breathing world of Roman and Medieval Britannia. Please RSVP for each of these three tours via the individual links below. Hyde Abbey Join us live to explore the fascinating site of Hyde Abbey, a medieval Benedictine monastery just outside the walls of Winchester, Hampshire, England! Southampton City Walls Join us live to explore the fascinating site of Southampton City Walls, England - a sequence of defensive structures built around the town with Roman and Anglo-Saxon origins! Fishbourne Roman Palace Join us live to explore the fascinating site of the Fishbourne Roman Palace, West Sussex- now housed in a museum, this palace is the largest Roman residence north of the Alps, and has an unusually early date of 75 AD, only around thirty years after the Roman conquest of Britain!

Save Ancient Studies Alliance will be at the annual meeting of the American Oriental Society from the 18th to the 21st of March this year. The event this year will be held at the Omni Hotel in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. One of our Team Leaders, Valeria Zubieta Lupo, and our founder, David Danzig, will be delivering papers on March 20th - for more information on these, follow the link here. We will be present throughout the conference at our booth at the Registration Table to chat. We hope to see you there!

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) is delighted to announce the continued development of their Archaeogaming team and the launch of our archaeogaming video learning modules being distributed to middle school teachers as part of their history and social studies curricula. This development has been supported by a significant grant from the University of North Carolina’s Critical Issues Fund, which will support this project in full for the first half of 2022. Who are we? SASA works to reverse the current downward trend in the study of the Ancient World, broadly defined. Building a grassroots movement through outreach, collaboration, accessibility, and public scholarship, we strive toward our goal of inspiring a wider, inclusive community of learners and students from all Ancient Studies fields. What is Archaeogaming? Archaeogaming is an innovative approach to the ancient world that combines a detailed, high-resolution depiction of the past with the engaging gameplay of modern video games. Rendering the ancient past in a three-dimensional videoscape and allowing the player to explore and interact with the world around them allows them to develop an idea of what the ancient world might have appeared like, how different it was to the modern world we live in, yet how similar the people were. Why is this helpful? Archaeogaming grips and engages young people in learning about the past as it is a more interactive learning experience. All our archaeogaming video learning modules - or AVLM’s - are age appropriate, offering video clips that show how the ancient world has been rendered in game. They require no prior knowledge on behalf of the educator - they all come with their own handouts and context pages that make sure that the educators can really get to grips with the information before they teach it - no gaming experience needed! Our AVLM’s are currently aimed at the 11-14 year old age bracket, but there is scope to scale it up all the way through to undergraduate level teaching. The sky really is the limit with archaeogaming, and here at SASA we are putting these creations to the best possible use by providing accessible education for all. Our archaeogaming lead at SASA, Abaan, is a teacher in training, and is working with SASA to help develop our AVLM’s - without any background in video games! This shows just how accessible these tools are designed to be. Her passion for the project has helped to push it to ever greater heights, helping to identify key themes within games that can be helpful for educators to focus on and teach about the past with. While times change, and media habits do too, Abaan believes that archaeogaming as an educational tool is no different to the use of films or stories in the past to help young people understand the past. It is thanks to volunteers like Abaan, with her passion and optimistic attitude, that allows SASA to keep providing accessible educational materials to educators of all levels, and help combat the downward trend of engagement with Ancient Studies. Our team will continue to work on all levels toward building an Ancient Studies community that is accessible and inclusive for all. Moreover, the support from funding bodies such as the New Jersey Council for Humanities and Critical Issues Fund from the University of North Carolina, providing us with over $25,000 of combined funding, make this all the more viable and allow SASA to continue its vital work in reversing the downward trend.

We are pleased to announce that Sanna Mun, a member of our Communications team, has entered into a new full-time marketing role. Sanna has been working with us closely for the past few months in our Comms department, helping us with our designs and working to further our mission. Sanna is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University and the University of Edinburgh, and has also worked in experimental archeology with a focus on ancient Egyptian magic and cosmeceuticals! More presently, Sanna has been working in music, design, and activism. Sanna joined SASA as the role appealed to her interests in the ancient world, while also combining her expertise in design and activism into the role at hand! Sanna had been planning on starting a PhD soon, and found SASA to be a supportive community to do this in - however, she has now received this full-time job offer and as such will be putting her PhD and her work with SASA on hold for the immediate future. We at SASA would like to extend our heartfelt congratulations to Sanna for her achievements and our thanks for all her hard work that she has done while working with us.

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) announces our second annual free public virtual conference, Opening the Ancient World! The conference is for ALL Ancient Studies scholars & anyone interested in the Ancient World. It is scheduled for Sunday August 14th and Monday August 15th, 2022. Last year’s virtual conference was a smash success, highlighting the scholarship of 19 Independent Scholars and opening Ancient Studies scholarship to an audience of 1,800 participants! This year we are looking at the hot button issue of Who Has the Power? Leaders and Leadership in the Ancient World. Since we have all experienced the increased attention focused on leadership positions around the world, this conference examines this topic in ancient times to shed light on the present. We are looking for scholars of all backgrounds to contribute papers to this conference and address topics under the theme of leadership in ancient cultures across the globe. SASA has made it our mission to combat the downward trend of engagement in Ancient Studies by reducing barriers to access the ancient world as often as possible. To this end, we are offering this conference entirely free of charge and are keen to encourage as many independent scholars to contribute their work to this conference as possible. Please share this post, our social media posts, and the linked flyer with your networks so that we can continue to raise awareness of our mission and make Ancient Studies as inclusive as possible. To find out more follow this link, and to RSVP to this upcoming event, follow the link here!

SASA would like to extend a warm welcome to our newest interns joining us for 2022! We have a cohort of new members joining us for internships across our teams, from around the world. SASA takes widening participation and reducing barriers to access in ancient studies very seriously, so we are incredibly happy to see individuals joining us from a range of backgrounds, including students outside of ancient history and non-students! Without further ado, we would like to introduce them and the roles they will be undertaking! Takami Harano - Massachusetts, Archaeogaming Team (pictured) Agnieszka Arcisz - UK, Executive Team Kaitlynn McGann - Colorado, USA, Outreach Team Maximiliano Angeletti Cots - Argentina, Access Team (pictured) Yixuan Zhang - New York, USA, Research Team Ava Dadvand - Connecticut, USA, Research Team (pictured) Agnieszka Arcisz - UK, Executive Team Natalie Marquez - California, Volunteer (pictured) Maddie Hoaglund - Indiana, USA, Fundraising Team It is an absolute pleasure to welcome all of these new members to our team - we look forward to seeing their support for our mission and the wonderful new insights they can bring!

The ancient world as a curriculum is a wide and fascinating subject but often lacks the relatable context necessary to engage audiences. To this end, we at SASA have worked over the last year to deliver the Inspire Campaign. The Inspire Campaign is a targeted social media campaign that invites enthusiastic interns to create posts aimed at delivering interesting, educating, and inspiring content that engages our audience across the spectrum. From curious quizzes to culinary delights, we have strove to deliver posts that cover the ancient world as widely and accurately as possible, geographically and chronologically. This campaign encourages the interns to learn more about the past that they care about and pass that passion on to their audience. This process has been overseen by their mentors, a mix of early career scholars or advanced PhD students, making sure that our information is up to scratch. This campaign received funding from the Society of Classical Studies to support this process as a part of their “Classics Everywhere” program. The results have been fantastic. Our campaign has covered categories such as anime, D&D, wisdom and proverbs, and the kitchen, covering every stretch of life and hobby wherever their interests may lie. This has been a fantastic opportunity for us to explore the more whimsical side of the ancient world, and perhaps the more real side - in how it pertains to us. Creating videos, infographics, or short stories has helped our team discover just how much we have in common with the ancients, and share that with the wider world. So here’s to us - one year down, and hopefully many more to go! Our work to combat the downward spiral of engagement with Ancient Studies takes many forms, from our academic keynotes to our historical fiction, and the support we get from our audience in all forms is what helps us along the way. So thank you, to you, our SASA supporters, for all that you do in keeping us going; together, we can make the Ancient World available to everyone.

SASA is pleased to announce that we are being featured by TechSoup in connection with their annual GrantStation discount promotion, February 15-16, 2022. Watch the video here. TechSoup is a nonprofit organization, founded in 1987, that helps other nonprofits optimize their use of technology in a number of ways. One major benefit TechSoup provides is discounted costs to nonprofits for a wide variety of high quality hardware and software that they obtain through collaborations with technology companies. GrantStation is precisely one such company. It provides a vast database of grant making foundations, many of which are difficult to find through other search avenues. TechSoup is a nonprofit organization that helps other nonprofits optimize their use of technology. One major benefit TechSoup provides is discounted costs to nonprofits for a wide variety of high quality hardware and software that they obtain through collaborations with technology companies. GrantStation is precisely one such company. It provides a vast database of grant making foundations, many of which are difficult to find through other search avenues. SASA Founder & Director, David Danzig, was interviewed about the role TechSoup and GrantStation played in our application for a $10,000 grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. This funding will fully sustain our Summer Reading Group program. Our exciting Reading Groups will support excellent young scholars to lead the discussion groups and to expand to new topics and a variety of areas of the Ancient World, and to provide groups in multiple languages. As we work to reverse the downward trend, our open-access work is more important than ever. As such, grants and other funds that support academic access with no barrier to entry play an integral role in our mission. To read more about our Reading Groups, please follow this link.