For many reasons, ReIRES TNA Scholarships can be of interest to scholars. We interviewed María Fontán Amoedo, who lately spent two weeks at EPHE in Paris in order to study Periklean building styles and iconography as part of the “Religious landscape” program.
We asked María what the main lines of her research project are that led her to come and work in Paris, and secondly what interests her most in her PhD project.
María: “The main objective of my research project is to study the Periklean building styles and iconography following the concept of “Religious landscape”, understood as the relations between the objects of religious use arranged in the space and the social groups that built and used them. It is a multidisciplinary approach from the History of art, History of Religions or Landscape archaeology through which I will try to study the constructive and iconographic program of Perikles, the mythological corpus of the Athenians and its reorientation during the democratic period to support a concrete ideology (myths that are embodied in the iconography) and the topography of Athens where that mythological discourses take place.
So, the final purpose of this project is to study the relationship between the Acropolis and other places of religious, political and social importance of Vth century B.C Athens and how these relationships were present in the daily life of Athenian society at that time.
In the current state of my research, some of the topics that are the focus of my attention are mainly the study of Athenian myths (autochthony myths, heroes such as Theseus or Ion…) and the topography and urbanism of the city as well as its evolution to the image we have of the city in the democratic period.
Due to this, I applied for the ReiRes scholarship designed for researchers in religious studies. And within the framework of this scholarship I chose to carry out my stay in the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris because it allowed me to access to libraries and archives which specialized in ancient history, religion or art and also the opportunity to work, collaborate and be advised by researchers well renowned in these disciplines, including research groups like the Archéologie et philologie d´Orient et d´Occident (AOrOc) orAnthropologie et Histoire des Mondes Antiques (ANHIMA).”