Currencies between Cultures
Thursday, 3 July, 2014
Humanities Building, Room 148, The University of Warwick.
Organised by Clare Rowan (C.Rowan{@}warwick.ac.uk).

About the Conference:

Though money is often characterised as an impersonal medium of exchange, it remains intricately connected to cultural value systems, social relationships, and political regimes. These characteristics are linked to the role of currency as a medium of commensuration designed to render equivalent and transitive once incomparable objects, ideas, signs, and meanings. In this way money goes 'between' cultures, and as a medium at the point of contact, money can often become ideologically charged. The eurozone, the rise of alternative currencies like Bitcoin, and the symbolic transformation of currencies during events like the Occupy movement ("We need a Revolution"), indicate that the social, ideological, and political aspects of money remain key modern concerns. This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore the differing ways money has connected, subverted, and entangled different cultures throughout history.

Programme:

CURRENCIES BEYOND BORDERS

10-10.30am: Globalisation, experimentation and foreshadowing: United States coins in the 1870s

Steve Roach, editor in chief of Coin World, Independent Scholar

10.30-11am: Crossing cultural frontiers: when is a Roman coin not a Roman coin?

David Wigg-Wolf, Roemisch-Germanische Kommission, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

11-11.30am: "One world, one language, one currency": The Esperantic proposal in 1907

David Astori, Università degli Studi di Parma, Italy

11.30am-12pm: Tea break

12-12.45pm: PLENARY SESSION

Capturing a place: A (post-colonial) reading of numismatic iconographic strategies

Liv Yarrow, Brooklyn College, CUNY, USA

12.45-1.30pm: Lunch

CURRENCIES AND COMMUNICATION

1.30-2pm: Audience targeting and the projection of power in the reign of Nerva

Nathan T. Elkins, Baylor University, USA

2-2.30pm: "Stamped all over the king's head": defaced pennies and the campaign for women's suffrage

Thomas Hockenhull, Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum

2.30-2.45pm: Break

CULTURAL INTERACTION AND ENTANGLEMENT

2.45-3.15pm: Symbols of interaction: entangled objects as numismatic imagery in ancient Thermae (Sicily)

Clare Rowan, The University of Warwick

3.15-3.45pm: Bilingual coins of Severus Alexander: facets of cultural interaction in the Roman provinces

Dario Calomino, Department of Coins and Medals, The British Museum

3.45-4pm: Break

CURRENCIES AT A TIME OF CHANGE

4-4.30pm: Language, narrative, value: The literary life of silver in seventeenth-century China

Sarah E. Kile, The University of Michigan

4.30-5pm: Placing a value on Syria's past and present cultures: change and continuity on Syrian banknotes under the Al-Assad regime from 1963 to present

Rebecca Dodd, Independent Scholar

5pm: Wine Reception

Generously supported by the Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick.

For more information, see:Currencies between Cultures(www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/research/seminars/
currencies_between_cultures/)