Dr Jessica Hughes
Senior Lecturer In Classical Studies
Biography
Professional biography
I have been working at The Open University since October 2008. Between 2005 and 2008 I held a post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge University in the Department of Archaeology, where I worked on a Leverhulme project called Changing Beliefs of the Human Body. I did my PhD and MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2001-2005), and studied for my BA in Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge (1998-2001).
Research interests
My research combines material and approaches from Classical Studies, Religious Studies and Art History. My publications include Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (CUP 2017), Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses (co-edited with Professor Graham Harvey, Equinox 2018), and a themed issue of the Open Arts Journal on Material Religion in Pompeii (2021).
Most of my recent research has focused on the changing religious landscape of the southern Italian region of Campania, and especially the area around Vesuvius. You can read more about this on my personal website Campania Sacra.
I am editor of our Open Access e-journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies, and Director of The Baron Thyssen Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion: visit our website at www.openmaterialreligion.org.
I run The Votives Project website with Dr Emma-Jayne Graham, and I work with Crispin Paine on the Gods' Collections project.
Projects
Our Lady of the Ruins: Religion and Memory in the Valley of Pompeii
This fellowship will enable me to complete a book about religion and memory in the Valley of Pompeii, Campania. Based on several years of research - including much on-site archival research in Pompeii - the book will tell the story of the large Catholic shrine of the Madonna of the Blessed Rosary of Pompeii, and its evolving relationship with the nearby archaeological excavations. Using theoretical concepts of 'layering', 'anchoring' and 'legendary topography', the book will explore how the 19th and 20th century builders of the ‘New Pompeii’ (the shrine and surrounding city) responded to the 'Old Pompeii' (the ancient ruins and excavations), and to the Valley's other historical monuments, geological landmarks, and mythical stories. It will show how these ancient things became part of the shrine’s identity, as devotion to Our Lady of Pompeii grew and became ever more international. Spanning the fields of classical reception and material religion, the book will use the exceptionally rich case-study of the Valley of Pompeii to explore the broad issue of how new religious sites are shaped by the older landscapes in which they are situated.
Publications
Book
Material Religion in Pompeii (2021)
Sensual Religion: Religion and the Five Senses (2018)
Votive Body Parts in Greek and Roman Religion (2017)
Remembering Parthenope: The Reception of Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present (2015)
Body Parts and Bodies Whole. Changing Relations and Meanings (2010)
Book Chapter
Tiny and Fragmented Votive Offerings from Classical Antiquity (2019)
North American Indigenous Song, the Sacred and the Senses (2018)
Exhibit 40 - The Room of the Ribbons (2018)
Phallic Fertility in Pompeii (2018)
Fractured Narratives: Writing the Biography of a Votive Offering (2016)
Introduction: Entering the siren's city (2015)
'No retreat, even when broken': classical architecture in the Presepe Napoletano (2015)
Memory and the Roman viewer: looking at the Arch of Constantine (2014)
Journal Article
Material religion and Pompeii: introduction (2021)
The five senses in Hell (2020)
The texture of the gift: religious touching in the Greco-Roman world (2018)
'Souvenirs of the Self': Personal Belongings as Votive Offerings in Ancient Religion (2017)
Studying Votives Across Cultures (2017)
The myth of return: restoration as reception in eighteenth-century Rome (2011)
Personifications and the Ancient Viewer: The Case of the Hadrianeum 'Nations' (2009)
Fragmentation as metaphor in the Classical healing sanctuary (2008)
