The project Locally Crafted Empires (LoCiS) will investigate the rich but understudied local portrait cultures of ancient Western Asia with the aim of determining how they reflect local and regional entanglements with and responses to different imperial hegemonies. LoCiS aims to reveal new knowledge about intersecting identities on an individual, local and regional level through a long durée perspective with a global historical outlook.

The thousands of surviving portraits have not been studied comprehensively neither diachronically, nor in contexts or in cross-regional perspectives. LoCiS aims at offering unprecedented insights into the multilayered narratives of the varied individual experiences in antiquity. This will in turn contribute to a paradigm shift through a materially grounded decolonization debate in the Classics.

The project is planned to kick off in the summer of 2025 and will run for five years involving a substantial group of international scholars, postdoctoral fellows and PhD students. The grant underlines professor Raja's standing as an internationally leading capacity within classical archaeology and the cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds and their extensive networks. It also cements AU as a powerhouse for core humanities projects, underlining that research taking empirical data as a point of departure allows for deep insights into the human past, while drawing threads all the way up to today's modern societies.