Call for papers: Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient World

The University of Birmingham and Newman University have jointly issued a call for papers and advance notice for their forthcoming ‘Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient Mediterranean World’.

Their call reads:

We invite paper proposals for an inter-disciplinary conference on the theme “Imagining the Afterlife in the Ancient Mediterranean World”, to take place in Birmingham, UK at the University of Birmingham and Newman University, 21-23 June 2016.

When people in the ancient world imagined the afterlife they invested it with their hopes and fears. Across the Mediterranean world these imagined afterlives took various forms, occupied different places, and did peculiar things to the people who would reside in them. As they did so they became integrated into broader narratives of selfhood, social life and cosmology. Talking about life after death necessarily meant reflecting on the social, cultural and political world in which people lived their lives before death…

Details and suggested areas for papers can be found here.

This looks like a really exciting conference and, for anyone interested, it would certainly be worthwhile keeping an eye on their website as more information is updated