Pure hybridism: Late Iron Age sculpture in southern Iberia

On sabbatical (academic year 2023-2024)

Pronouns: she/her

Alicia Jiménez is associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. She has wide-ranging interests in postcolonial theory, ancient Roman imperialism and the material traces of violence in the creation of the western provinces of the Roman empire, with a special focus on the Iberian Peninsula (Hispania). 

She is author of Imagines hibridae. A postcolonial approach to the study of the Baetican necropolis (in Spanish, Anejos AEspA, 2008), an analysis of the impact of Roman colonization in the funerary rituals of southern Spain and how different discourses about collective ancestry were simultaneously mediated in the forum and the tomb. Her second book, Imitation and Power in Ancient Rome: an Archaeology of Mimesis (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), is an investigation on how shapes, images and objects are transmitted and replicated in provincial contexts and the power dynamics enmeshed in imitation processes. Dr. Jiménez is editor of the proceedings of a session on the re-creation of Punic identities in southern Iberia and the north of Africa during Roman times (Colonising a Colonised territory, 2010, XVII International Congress of Classical Archaeology, AIAC) and co-editor of two volumes that focus on two important anthropological problems: the introduction of coins in pre-monetary societies (with M. P. García-Bellido, L. Callegarin, Barter, money and coinage in the ancient Mediterranean, 2011) and the role of coinage in the establishment of the Empire during the late Roman Republic (with M. P. García-Bellido and A. Mostalac, Del imperium de Pompeyo a la auctoritas de Augusto. Homenaje a Michael Grant, 2008). In addition, she has published several articles in English and Spanish in peer-reviewed journals (such as the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Antiquity and World Archaeology) and more than 20 book chapters. She is also the co-author of three archaeological reports on the Roman camps at Renieblas. 

She is the PI of Duke’s excavation project at the Roman army camps near Numantia (Renieblas, Spain, 2nd-1st c. BCE), one of the oldest Roman camps in the Mediterranean and a key site to understand the role of the army in the creation of the first Roman provinces. Dr. Jiménez has been visiting Durham’s cemeteries with her course “The archaeology of death” since 2015 and is a co-founder of the Durham Black Burial Grounds Collaboratory, a multi-university/community research group studying Durham’s African American burial grounds, sharing their histories with the public, and reinvigorating them as spaces of dignity and learning (P. I. Adam Rosenblatt, Duke University).

Dr. Jiménez sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Roman Archaeology and the newest Spanish journal solely devoted to Iberian Archaeology, Archaeologia Iberica. She is also a member of the advisory board of the Norwegian Archaeological Review. 

She has completed research stays in Germany (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Zentrale, Berlin), the UK (Glasgow University, University College London), France (ANHIMA, CNRS-EHESS-EPHE-Paris 1-Paris 7), and the USA (Columbia, Yale, Stanford and Berkeley) and had the opportunity to travel to Greece, the UK and the US as a fellow of a Getty Grant, The Arts of Rome’s Provinces, a three-year project that brought together an international group of historians, art historians, museum professionals and archaeologists to promote a broad conversation about the particular manifestations of material culture in Rome's imperial provinces (PI Natalie B. Kampen).

Dr. Jiménez earned her PhD at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Prior to her arrival at Duke, she was Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics at Stanford University and Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid (CCHS, CSIC).