Jessica Lamont

Jessica Lamont
A social and cultural historian of the ancient Greek world from c.750–250 BCE, Jessica Lamont has been at Yale since 2016 (Ph.D. 2016, Johns Hopkins University; B.A. 2008, The College of William & Mary). Lamont’s research and teaching focus on Greek religion, medicine, and magic. Much of her work is informed by Greek inscriptions, and sheds light on social histories of the broader Classical world, from Sicily to the Aegean Islands to the northern Black Sea.

 Lamont is currently at work on a second book, Health and Healing in Ancient Greece. This project explores the emergence of medical pluralism —the interwoven professional and cultural systems or “marketplaces” that evolved to manage health and disease— in Greek communities across the ancient Mediterranean. This research illuminates the breadth of healthcare options available to ancient Greek individuals and communities between c.500–250 BCE: surgeons, physicians who dissected animals to better understand human anatomy, midwives, pharmaceutical “root-cutters”, divine healers like Asklepios and their health-giving sanctuaries in which temple medicine was practiced. Lamont is excited to share the study of Greek traditions of health and healing with Yale students and colleagues, including through the resources available for the study of ancient medicine at Yale’s Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. This year she is co-teaching a “Graeco-Roman Medicine” seminar with Professor Malina Buturović, and a “Medicine, Magic, Miracle” lecture course with Professor Laura Nasrallah. Also with Professor Buturović, Lamont is co-organizing the annual Classics Colloquium, “ANCIENT BODIES, IN SICKNESS & HEALTH,” a monthly event to which all are welcome for lunch and lively conversation.

 Lamont’s first book, In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2023), provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice, documenting the cultural pressures that drove the use of curse tablets, spells, incantations, and other “magic” rites. The project expands our understanding of daily life in ancient communities, showing how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss — all while conjuring the gods and powers of the Underworld. In reading between traditional histories of Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic Greece, the project draws out new voices and new narratives to consider: here are the cooks, tavern keepers, garland weavers, helmsmen, barbers, and other persons who often slip through the cracks of ancient history. 
Lamont continues to work on Greek and Roman magic, a field propelled by the continuous recovery of new ritual texts and objects: curse tablets, amulets, curse effigies, and more. Together with Dr. J. Curbera (Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin), she has started a new project on magical texts from ancient Corinth; much of this research is grounded in the cosmopolitan capital of the Roman province of Achaea, and the diverse communities who lived, worked, and worshipped there.

Lamont also has interests in the study of ancient Greek women (and how epigraphy grants access to female voices and agency), in addition to Greek archaeology and material culture. She has worked for more than a decade as a field archaeologist at sites in Greece and beyond, with a focus on networks of trade and mobility, Greek ceramics, and domestic economies (especially textile production). She is the President of the New Haven chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, and serves on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Lamont’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Center for Hellenic Studies, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Berlin), Alexander Onassis Foundation, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship in Greek Studies).