Jessica Lamont
· Assistant Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of History; member of the Program in History of Science and Medicine; Director of Undergraduate Studies in ClassicsVerifiedYale University · Department of Classics
Active 2004–2026
About
Jessica Lamont is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Yale University, with courtesy appointments in History and membership in the Program in History of Science and Medicine. She has been at Yale since 2016 and earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2016, with a B.A. from The College of William & Mary in 2008. Her research and teaching focus on the social histories of the ancient Greek world from circa 750 to 250 BCE, emphasizing Greek religion, medicine, and magic. Much of her work is informed by Greek inscriptions and sheds light on broader social contexts across regions including Sicily, the Aegean Islands, and the northern Black Sea.
Research topics
- Sociology
- History
- Ancient history
- Archaeology
- Philosophy
- Political Science
- Epistemology
- Aesthetics
- Linguistics
- Economics
- Art
- Psychology
- Biology
- Law
- Positive economics
- Microeconomics
- Geography
- Social psychology
- Anthropology
Selected publications
Blood, Death, and ‘Magical’ Ritual Practice
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht eBooks · 2026-05-06
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2023-08-24 · 26 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingAbstract From binding spells and incantations to curse-writing rituals, magic pervaded the ancient Greek world. In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice from 750 to 250 bce, documenting the cultural pressures that drove the use of curse tablets, charms, spells, and other private rites. This book expands understandings of daily life in ancient communities, showing how individuals were making sense of the world and coping with conflict, vulnerability, competition, anxiety, desire, and loss, all while conjuring the gods and powers of the Underworld. Bringing together epigraphic, historical, literary, archaeological, and material evidence, this volume reads between traditional histories of Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic Greece, drawing out new voices and new narratives to consider: here are the cooks, tavern keepers, garland weavers, helmsmen, barbers, and other persons who often slip through the cracks of ancient history. The texts and objects presented here offer glimpses of public and private lives across many centuries, illuminating the interplay of ritual and conflict-management strategies among free and enslaved persons, men and women, pagans and Christians. Filled with new material and insights, this book offers a fresh perspective on ancient Greek social history and religion, highlighting the role of ritual in negotiating life’s uncertainties.
2023-08-24
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This Conclusion summarizes the book’s three parts, and the major themes and insights found therein. It also provides an overview of the breadth, diversification, and heterogeneity of curse rituals during the later Roman Empire, which, while by no means exhaustive, leaves readers with a sense of the practice’s transformation over time and space in the centuries after those examined in previous chapters.
2023-08-24
other1st authorCorrespondingSubject Greek and Roman Archaeology Religion in the Ancient World Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Inscribed Materialities: Greek Curse Tablets
Brepols eBooks · 2023-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2023-08-24
paratext1st authorCorrespondingSubject Greek and Roman Archaeology Religion in the Ancient World Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Curse-Writing and the Epigraphic Habit in Athens
2023-10-25
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter examines the relationship between early Attic curse-writing and the so-called epigraphic habit, demonstrating how the latter provides a useful framework for thinking about the former during the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE. As private, concealed ritual texts with decentralized modes of circulation, curse tablets preserve various influences, including several that are epigraphic in nature: language and formatting displayed in civic decrees, public name-lists, and epistolary genres of communication.
Public Imprecations and Private Curse-Writing
2023-08-24
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This final chapter investigates public, orally pronounced curses, arai (ἀραί), and explores their relationship to private curse-writing rituals. As widespread sacred and civic phenomena, arai were pervasive in the early Greek polis, and featured regularly in treaties, oath ceremonies, civic institutions, and sacred precincts. This chapter first illuminates the linguistic contours of the public curse, and the contexts in which it found use in Greek communities. Arai carry inherently different forms of ritual speech from the binding spells examined in the previous chapter, yet just as some curse-writers were influenced by incantations, others drew inspiration from civic discourse, and public arai in particular. Curse tablets that employ the language of sacred and civic arai are understudied in scholarship on both oral and inscribed maledictions. This chapter demonstrates how practitioners—from the development of curse-writing rituals in western Sicily to their proliferation in fourth-century Athens, and well beyond—were influenced by public arai. Such curse tablets accordingly provide access to another form of early ritual speech, the public curse (ara). The final chapter thus expands the project’s scope by showing how some curse-writing rituals could partake in (and thereby preserve) older, oral traditions of sacred and civic imprecations.
2023-08-24
other1st authorCorrespondingExtract In general, I prefer Greek spellings of places, authors, and personal names (especially in transcriptions and translations from inscribed texts), except in cases in which the Latinized spelling is more established or feels less awkward (hence Kerameikos, Hekate, but also Cassander, Corinth, etc.). In translations of Greek inscriptions, some of which are given here in English for the first time, I have tried to stay close to the Greek while still remaining intelligible to a wider readership (ἐΣκαμβωνιδῶν, “of the deme Skambonidai”). The few unaccented Greek personal names are names with two attested but gender-dependent accentuations, and I omit accents so as to not exclude either possibility. For abbreviations of ancient authors and their works, please refer to The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed. (2012), edited by S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth, and E. Eidinow; for journal abbreviations, see L’Année Philologique; other abbreviations used are listed below.
2023-08-24
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter explores the relationship between inscribed Greek curse tablets and oral binding incantations. It suggests that hexameter binding incantations came to influence some ancient curse-writers, whose inscribed texts accordingly preserve traces of older, performative speech. This is evident in curse tablets containing dactylic hexameter, epic diction, deictic language, and a binding expression that turned upon (1) δέω as curse verb, (2) δεσμῶι or δεσμοῖς as cognate instrumental datives, and (3) a powerful adjective such as ἀργαλέος or κρατερός to describe the bonds. Considered alongside older hexameter verse, curse tablets can be used to reconstruct a “binding language” exploited by several early hexameter genres—an ancient, widespread tradition of incantations known to poets, oracles, and curse-writers alike. From Athens to Cyrene, curse tablets illuminate the role of binding spells and incantations in popular culture as common forms of cultural knowledge, utilized fluidly across genres and media for many centuries.
Frequent coauthors
- 36 shared
Philip Venticinque
Bryn Mawr College
- 36 shared
Celia Sánchez Natalías
Universidad de Zaragoza
- 36 shared
Christopher A. Faraone
University of Chicago
- 36 shared
Greg Woolf
University of Birmingham
- 1 shared
Smiti Nathan
- 1 shared
Laurel A. Poolman
Johns Hopkins University
- 1 shared
Steven Brandt
United States Air Force Academy
- 1 shared
Kifle Zerue
Aksum University
Awards & honors
- Phi Beta Kappa Society (Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship in Gre…
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- American School of Classical Studies at Athens
- Center for Hellenic Studies
- Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Berlin)
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