9:00                 Welcome and Opening Remarks 

                        Matthew P. Canepa and Nastasya Kosygina (UCI)

9:20                Anastasia Tchaplyghine (Independent Scholar) “The divine body, the human body, and the lived/natural world in Mesopotamia.” 

10:00                Rita Lucarelli (Associate Professor of Egyptology, UC Berkeley) “‘When everything is human, the human is an entirely different thing…’ Animal powers in the ancient Egyptian demonic imagery and beyond.”  

10:40                Coffee Break 

11:00                Verena Lepper (Curator, Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung,   Berlin/GRI) “Worldmaking in Ancient Egypt. Elephantine as a Case study”   

11:40                Sara Cole (Assistant Curator of Antiquities, Getty Villa) “Material Encounters with the Divine in Ptolemaic Egypt: A Faience Oinochoe of Berenike II (Getty 96.AI.58).” 

12:10                Lunch  

1:20                 José C. Carvajal López (Lecturer in Historical Archaeology, University of Leicester) “Worldmaking through Material Culture and Con-Text: Islamization in the Persian Gulf and in Iberia.” 

2:00                Bermet Nishanova (Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, UCI) “The Veiled World:   Ontological Parameters of Early and Premodern Islamic Textiles” 

2:40                 Stephanie Langin-Hooper (Karl Kilinski II Endowed Chair of Hellenic Visual Culture, SMU) “Worldbuilding in Miniature: the Social Agency and Embodied Experience of Seals and Seal Impressions in Hellenistic Babylonia.” 

3:20                 Coffee Break

3:40                  Nastasya Koysgina (Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies, UCI) “World in a Bowl: inscription as prosthetic agency in late antique Mesopotamia.” 

4:40                 Jeffrey Spier (Anissa and Paul John Balson II Senior Curator of Antiquities, Getty Villa) "Greco-Roman amulets: popular tradition versus scholarly innovation." 

5:20                  Remarks/Discussion 

                        Matthew P. Canepa (Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran, UCI)