Curated/Reviewed by Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate
About Dr. Bond
Sarah Emily Bond is a Professor of History at the University of Iowa.[1] Her research focuses on late Roman history, epigraphy, law, topography, GIS, and Digital Humanities.[1]
Bond received her PhD in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2011.[2] Her doctoral thesis was entitled Criers, Impresarios, and Sextons: Disreputable Occupations in the Roman World.[3] Her PhD was supervised by Professor Richard Talbert. Bond received a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2007.[4] She was awarded a BA in Classics and History from the University of Virginia in 2005.[5]
Bond is the author of numerous articles on tradesmen and law in the later Roman empire, and her first monograph, entitled Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published in 2016 by University of Michigan Press.[6] A review found it to have made a “significant advance in our understanding of attitudes and reality throughout antiquity.”[7]
Bond was appointed Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa in 2014,[8] after holding an assistant professorship in Ancient and Early Medieval History at Marquette University from 2012.[9] She is Chair of the Society for Classical Studies Communication Committee, associate editor for the Digital Humanities’ Pleiades Project and co-Principal Investigator for the Big Ancient Mediterranean Project.[10][8] She is also a member of the executive committee for the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy for the period 2018-2021.[11] As of July 2019, Bond is no longer part of the University of Iowa Classics Department, and has taken up appointment as an Associate Professor with the History Department.
Bond is a strong advocate for academic public scholarship and sustains a high level of visibility on social media. She has more than 25,000 followers on Twitter, and maintains her blog, History From Below.[12] She is the editor-in-chief of the Blog for the Society for Classical Studies.[13] She is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.com, and she has written for Forbes, The New York Times, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the online Classics journal Eidolon.[14][15] Bond created the website Women of Ancient History (WOAH), a crowd-sourced digital map and catalog of women who specialize in classical and biblical history.[16] In April 2019 she appeared on a segment on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee talking about polychromy on ancient statues.[17]
In 2019 she won the Society for Classical Studies’ Outreach Prize for Individuals.[12] In her commendation, the SCS praised her expertise on ‘an impressive array of subjects with the varied goals of inspiring curiosity and self-reflection…the work Prof. Bond does is highly intelligent—true public scholarship—and a tribute to our discipline.’[12]
Ancient Aliens
From Dr. Bond’s article on Hyperallergic.com:
At the ancient site of Hatnub, a quarry in the eastern Egyptian desert not far from Faiyum, archaeologists have recently discovered a sled ramp system used to transport alabaster blocks. Post holes and a ramp with stairs on either side indicate that the contraption allowed Egyptian builders to move heavy blocks up and down steep slopes. Inscriptions have now helped archaeologists from the Institut français d’archéologie orientale and the University of Liverpool to date this groundbreaking technology to at least the reign of Khufu, who ruled from 2589–2566 BCE. Khufu is known as the pharaoh who likely commissioned the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Discovery and reconstruction of the ramp allows us to better understand ancient construction techniques. It also chips away at the long-held but fringe theory that the blocks were so heavy and the distances they would have to travel so lengthy that aliens must have built the pyramids.
Where did the theory of aliens building the pyramids actually come from? Since the late 19th century, science fiction writers have imagined Martians and other alien lifeforms engaged in great feats of terrestrial engineering. Earlier alien theories surrounding Atlantis may have spawned fantasies about alien building. The most substantial evidence for non-earthly creatures arrived in the wake of H.G. Wells’s success.
Aliens, Atlantis, and Aryanism
Dr. Bond was referenced in an article on the University of Texas at Austin Classics Blog speaking to pseudoarchaeology and the disturbing racist implications it has:
Altering the past to suit one’s needs is nothing new; early American colonists attempted to wipe away the prehistory of the native people of the American West in favor of white ‘Moundbuilders.’ But Erich von Daniken’s fact-free “Chariots of the Gods” inaugurated an era of anything-goes speculation on what exactly it was our ancestors got up to, and ‘Ancient Aliens’ and ‘Legends of the Lost with Megan Fox’ spread wild assertions with a cheerful disregard for scientific accuracy or common sense.
One might be tempted to dismiss these out of hand, were it not for the disturbingly racist implications many of these hypotheses carries. The Pyramids, Great Zimbabwe and the Native American city of Cahokia are regularly called into question, but no one ever argues that the Parthenon is alien handiwork (see also Sarah E. Bond’s article on ancient aliens and racism). The obvious implication is that only Europeans were ever capable of complex feats of engineering. The result is a spreading aporia about the construction of ancient monuments and an insidious distrust of archaeologists and historians as an élite cabal of bookworms and pedants obscuring the truth of the past from the world.
Endnotes
- “Sarah E. Bond | History | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences | The University of Iowa”. clas.uiowa.edu. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
- “Sarah E. Bond | Department of Classics | College of Liberal Arts & Sciences | The University of Iowa”. Clas.uiowa.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- Bond, Sarah (2011). Criers, Impresarios, and Sextons: Disreputable Occupations in the Roman World (Thesis).
- Bond, Sarah (2007). Ob Merita: the epigraphic rise and fall of the civic patrona in Roman North Africa (Thesis).
- “Bond | Department of Classics”. Classics.as.virginia.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- Cuomo, Serafina. “Review of: Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean”. Bryn Mawr Classical Review.
- Knapp, Robert C. (2017-12-22). “Trade and Taboo. Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean by Sarah E. Bond (review)”. American Journal of Philology. 138 (4): 754–758. doi:10.1353/ajp.2017.0041. ISSN 1086-3168. S2CID 165583461.
- Elliott, Tom (2014-08-13). “Sarah Bond joins editorial board”. Pleiades: a gazetteer of past places. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
- Bond, Sarah E., Curriculum Vitae, retrieved 28 February 2019
- Bond, Sarah (2018-01-20). “Sarah Bond”. Society for Classical Studies. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- “Executive Committee”. ASGLE: The American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy | Société americaine d’épigraphie grecque et latine. 2016-01-10. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
- “2019 Outreach Prize Citations”. Society for Classical Studies. 2018-12-03. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- “SCS Blog Credits”. Society for Classical Studies. 2018-06-30. Retrieved 2019-07-22.
- “Sarah E. Bond (U. of Iowa), “Signs of the Times: Fighting the Alt-Right with Public History and Classics” | Department of Classics”. Classics.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- “Sarah E. Bond”. Eidolon.pub. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- “Women of Ancient History – a crowdsourced list of female ancient historians”. Retrieved 2018-12-07.
- “Watch Two Hilarious Comedians Visit the Met to Discover the Truth Behind the Alt-Right’s Whitewashing of Classical Sculpture”. artnet News. 2019-04-09. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
- Bond, Sarah E. (7 May 2018). “This Is Not Sparta”. Eidolon.pub. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
- “Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens”. Hyperallergic.com. 13 November 2018. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
- Bond, Sarah. “Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu”. Forbes.com. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
- Bond, Sarah. “What ‘Game Of Thrones’ Gets Right And Wrong About Eunuchs And Masculinity”. Forbes.com. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
Introductory “about” text originally published by Wikipedia, 12.07.2018, under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.