As the annual BSR/ICS named lecturer, Prof Zahra Newby will give a lecture at the British School in Rome, entitled 'Staging the City: community, identity and hierarchy in the theatre at Hierapolis (Phrygia)'

The ancient theatre was a place where the city came together in communal celebration of festivals while also displaying internal and external hierarchies. Focussing on the theatre of Hierapolis in Phrygia, which saw a major refurbishment in the early third century AD, this lecture explores the interaction between physical space and the activities it enclosed and enabled. At Hierapolis, architecture, figural and epigraphic display and human action worked in synergy to construct civic hierarchies and identities, staging the city to itself and the wider world.

This lecture draws on Prof Newby's Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Project, Materiality and Meaning in Greek Festival Culture of the Roman Imperial Period