Eurasian Localisms

From Mesopotamia to Central Asia, regions in central Eurasia in the Hellenistic period are often viewed, presented, and imbued with meaning as 'places in between' - cultural melting pots, resulting from a fusion of Eastern and Western cultures after Alexander the Great. Milinda Hoo critically explores scholarly understandings of cultural inbetweenness in the regions of Baktria, Parthia, and Babylonia in the third to first centuries BCE, focusing on the diverse ways in which the model of Hellenism has been used to make historical meaning out of eclectic material culture. The sites of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Old Nisa, Seleukeia on the Tigris, and Babylon serve as core case studies to investigate perceptions of Hellenism in places that are considered culturally 'inbetween'. These form the foundation for a new translocal approach, based on globalization concepts, to better and more critically understand what we consider as Hellenism and localism in the East.

Milinda Hoo is a global and ancient historian with research interests in Hellenism, localism, globalization, postcolonial theory, Orientalism, imaginative geography, placedness, and cross-cultural relations in the history, archaeology, and historiography of the Eurasian world region. She earned her PhD at the Christian-Albrecht University of Kiel in 2018 and is currently Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin auf Zeit) in the Department of Ancient History at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg.