Classics Society Presents: The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World and Now – A Zoom Lecture by Invited Speaker Professor Patricia Kim
In this talk, Professor Patricia Eunji Kim provides an overview of her recently published monograph, The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025). Exploring evidence in the interconnected eastern Mediterranean and western Asia from the fourth to second centuries BCE, Professor Kim argues that the arts of queenship were central to expressions of dynastic (and sometimes even imperial) consolidation, continuity, and legitimacy.
From gems, coins, and vessels to monuments and sculpture, the visual and material cultures of queenship appeared in a range of sacred settings, public spaces, royal courts, and domestic domains. Encompassing several dynasties, including the Hecatomnids, Argeads, Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Attalids, Kim inaugurates new methods for comparing and interpreting visual articulations of queenship and ideal femininity from distinct yet culturally entangled contexts, thus illuminating the ways that women had an impact art and politics in the ancient world. In this talk, Professor Kim will also highlight the various modes of scholarly and public engagement with which she has experimented in her research on arts of ancient queenship.
About the Speaker
Patricia Eunji Kim is a specialist in the visual and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia, using methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of identity, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. Broadly, her areas of expertise include Greek and Hellenistic art and archaeology, Hellenistic cross-cultural studies, and classical receptions.
Kim’s first monograph, The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), is the only book-length study to explore the visual and material culture of queenship from western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean from the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE. This project on queenship has led to a suite of other publications, including an edited volume, Queens in Antiquity and the Present (Bloomsbury 2024), an arts-driven public symposium, and a forthcoming exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Getty Villa that will open to the public in 2027. Kim’s next book project investigates the social and cultural meanings of arms and armor from the ancient Mediterranean world, approaching weaponry as symbolically rich and socially significant objects of ritual.
As a curator, Kim often collaborates with contemporary artists, writers, and a range of institutions and organizations to facilitate conversations and illuminate a variety of perspectives on transnational memory cultures, public art and monuments, and receptions of antiquity.
Kim’s work has been recognized with awards and fellowships from Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies, the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.
