afutrell

afutrell@arizona.edu

Phone

520-621-3879

Office

Chávez 426

Personal Site

Alison Futrell's Webpage

Futrell, Alison

Associate Professor

My interests lie in the discourse, performance, and imagery of power in imperial Rome, with special interest in spectacle and gender. I have authored and edited and co-edited Blood in the Arena; The Roman Games; and The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. I am likewise alert to representations of the ancient Mediterranean in modern popular culture, particularly film and television, with publications on The Viking Queen (1967), Spartacus (1960 and 2010-13), HBO’s Rome (2005, 2007) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001). I have appeared as a talking head in a number of public-facing media, including, most recently, for National Geographic and BBC History Extra, on such topics as gladiators, the Roman arena, Cleopatra, Spartacus, Boudica, Hannibal, and the Bible. In the summer of 2022, I was featured in "Colosseum", an eight-part series on the History Channel! (I was a discussant on a teaser podcast for the channel's History This Week, which dropped on July 4). With Paul Milliman, I am co-creator of the University of Arizona Enhanced Experience for Age of Empires IV. The two of us were featured presenters in the University of Arizona's Wonder House at SXSW 2023, where we talked about “Gaming the Past: History as Time Travel”.

Currently Teaching

CLAS 205 – Ancient History: Roman History

This course offers a survey of Roman History from the prehistoric settlements in the area of the Seven Hills to the deterioration of the western Empire in the fifth century C.E. Special topics of interest include the material culture of the Roman world; the use of images in the pursuit of political agendas; classical notions of the divine; and concepts of gender, power, and identity. Popular representations of ancient Rome, specifically in film, will provide another area of consideration for comparison throughout the semester.

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CLAS 404C – Cleopatra: Power, Passion, Propaganda

This course focuses on Cleopatra VII (69-30 BCE), the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt and one of the best-known women in history and a key powerbroker during a period of important political change, one with enduring repercussions for the western world. She has been, however, deliberately memorialized as a "romantic" agent, a deployer of "feminine wiles", whose gender and political toolbox rightly doomed her efforts to failure. Students will interrogate the process of transforming a historical individual into an object lesson, a trope of femininity, and a cinematic legend, unpacking the messages crafted for a range of audiences and purposes by multiple creators, including Cleopatra herself. We begin with the historical background of the Hellenistic period, cosmopolitan and multicultural, focusing especially on the dynamism of women in the ideology of royal power and as image-makers in their own right, developing special forms for female authority and female patronage. A number of earlier Cleopatras establish context and particular precedents, creating official personae to engage effective interactions with fundamental groups; these include the resilient Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra II (r. 175-116 BCE) and Cleopatra Thea, token in a dynastic alliance who became Great Queen of Syria, dominating the Seleucid throne for a generation. Students will then sift through the evidence for Cleopatra VII, both the contentious (and largely hostile) material for her Mediterranean activities as well as the Egyptian record that may represent the specific efforts of the queen herself, utilizing then-ancient symbol and ritual to assert her legitimate imperial authority and structure her collaboration with major stakeholders in the Nile realm. The last section of the course looks to the lingering memory of Cleopatra long after her death, closely examining images in drama, art, and film to explore how the story of Cleopatra has been crafted and recrafted to represent different "truths" about sex, power, and identity.

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CLAS 504C – Cleopatra: Power, Passion, Propaganda

Graduate-level requirements include two short in-class presentations on particular aspects of course material; weekly responses to the assigned reading, focusing on modern scholarship; and a 5000-word final paper, comparative in nature.

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