Jessica Lamont

A social and cultural historian of the ancient Greek world from c.750-250 BCE, Jessica Lamont has been at Yale since 2016 (Ph.D. 2016, Johns Hopkins University; B.A. 2008, The College of William & Mary). Lamont’s research and teaching focus on Greek religion, epigraphy, magic, medicine and healing. Much of her work is informed by Greek inscriptions, and sheds light on social histories of the broader Classical world, from Sicily to the Aegean Islands to the northern Black Sea.

Lamont is at work on a book, Health and Healing in Classical Greece. This project explores the emergence of medical pluralism —the interwoven professional and cultural systems or “marketplaces” that evolved to manage health and disease— in Greek communities across the Mediterranean. This research illuminates the breadth of healthcare options available to individuals and communities between c.500–250 BCE: surgeons, physicians who dissected animals to better understand human anatomy, midwives, sellers of pharmaceuticals, divine healers like Asklepios and their health-giving sanctuaries in which temple medicine was practiced. Lamont is excited to share the study of Greek and Roman traditions of health and healing with Yale students and colleagues, including through the resources available for the study of ancient medicine at Yale’s Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, through department colloquia, and in co-teaching with Profs Malina Buturović and James Uden.

Lamont’s first book, In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press 2023) provides the first historical study of the development and dissemination of ritualized curse practice, documenting the cultural pressures that drove the use of curse tablets, spells, incantations, and other “magic” rites. The project 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. In reading between traditional histories of Archaic, Classical, and early Hellenistic Greece, the project draws 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. 
This book won the James R. Wiseman Book Award (2025) from the Archaeological Institute of America, and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South’s First Book Award (2024–25).

Lamont continues to study Greek and Roman magic, a field propelled by the continuous recovery of new ritual texts and objects. Together with Dr. J. Curbera (Inscriptiones Graecae, Berlin), she is at work a project on magical inscriptions from ancient Corinth, research grounded in the cosmopolitan communities of Roman Imperial Greece.

Lamont also has interests in the study of ancient Greek women (and how epigraphy grants access to female voices and agency), in addition to Greek archaeology and material culture. She has worked as a field archaeologist at sites in Greece and beyond, with a focus on networks of trade and mobility, Greek ceramics, and domestic economies (especially textile production). She is the President of the New Haven chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America, and serves on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Lamont’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Center for Hellenic Studies, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (Berlin), Alexander Onassis Foundation, Association Internationale d’Épigraphie Grecque et Latine, and the Phi Beta Kappa Society (Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship in Greek Studies).

Recent Articles

• “Magic in Corinth’s Fountain of the Lamps, c.400-550 CE.” Forthcoming, Hesperia (2026). Co-authored with J. Curbera
• “Time, Festivals, and the Ἐννεατηρίς in Archaic and Classical Greece.” Classical Antiquity 44.2 (2025), 202-233
• “Classical and Hellenistic Curse Tablets from the Athenian Agora.” Hesperia 92.2 (2023). Co-authored with J. Curbera
• “Trade, Literacy, and Documentary Histories of the Northern Black Sea.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 143 (2023)
• “Orality, Written Literacy, and Early Sicilian Curse Tablets.” Greece & Rome 69.1 (2022), 27–51. [Special Issue: Curse Tablets in the Wider Realms of Execrations, Commerce, Law, and Technology]
• “Cosmogonies of the Bound: Titans, Giants, & Early Greek Binding Spells.” Classical Philology 116.4 (2021), 471-97
• “Cursing Theophrastos in Paros.” American Journal of Archaeology 125.2 (2021), 207-222
• “Cold and Worthless: The Role of Lead in Curse Tablets.” TAPA 151.1 (2021), 35-68
• “Crafting Curses in Classical Athens: A New Cache of Hexametric Katadesmoi.” Classical Antiquity 40.1 (2021), 76-117
• “The Curious Case of the Cursed Chicken: A New Binding Ritual from the Athenian Agora.” Hesperia 90.1 (2021), 79-113
• “Beta Samati: Discovery and Excavation of an Aksumite Town.” Antiquity 93.372 (2019), 1534-1552. Co-authored with M. J. Harrower, I. Dumitru, et al.
• “Early Greek Incantations in Late Roman Jerusalem: Kyrilla’s Judicial Curse.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 200.1 (2019), 43-53
• “A New Commercial Curse Tablet from Classical Athens.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 196.4 (2015), 159-74

Recent Chapters

• “Blood, Death, and ‘Magical’ Ritual Practice,” in The Power of Blood, ed. J. Hoffmann-Salz. Brill (2026), 95-111
• “Textile Tools: Cloth Production & Domestic Economies,” in The Molyvoti, Thrace, Archaeological Project (MTAP). Hesperia Supplements, eds N. Arrington et al. (2025), 501–527
• “Curse Writing and the Epigraphic Habit in Athens,” in Inscriptions & the Epigraphic Habit, ed. R. Benefiel & C. Keesling. Brill Studies in Greek & Roman Epigraphy (2023), 274-292
• “The Aksumite Empire of East Africa: From the Red Sea to Byzantium and Beyond.” Africa and Byzantium, ed. A. Achi. Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications. Africa and Byzantium Exhibition: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nov. 2023–Mar. 2024 (2023), 100-106, 301
• “Inscribed Materialities: Greek Curse Tablets,” in New Approaches to the Materiality of Texts in the Ancient Mediterranean, Archaeology of the Mediterranean World 4. Brepols (2023), 143-57
• “Cursing in Context: Athenian Pyre-Curses,” in Curses in Contexts III: The Greek Curse Tablets of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, eds C. Faraone & I. Polinskaya. Papers and Monographs from the Norwegian Institute at Athens (2021), 75-104
• “Of Curses and Cults: Private and Public Ritual in Classical Xypete,” in Popular Religion and Ritual in Prehistoric and Ancient Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Γ. Βαβουρανάκης et al. Oxford: Archaeopress (2018), 125-136. Co-authored with Γ. Μπουντουράκη
• “Panathenaic Amphorae and Amphorae of Panathenaic-Shape in the Workshop of the Berlin Painter,” Entries, The Berlin Painter & His World, ed. M. Padgett. Yale University Press (2017), 232-5; 353-8
• “Asklepios in the Piraeus and the Mechanisms of Cult Appropriation,” in Autopsy in Athens: Recent Archaeological Research on Athens and Attica, ed. M. Miles. Oxford: Oxbow Press (2015), 37-50

Recent Courses

• Greek Social History (600–250 BCE): New Approaches 
• Ancient Medicine: Greece & Rome (co-taught with M. Buturović and J. Uden)
• Ancient Greek History: 1400-323 BCE
• Medicine, Magic, Miracle (co-taught with L. Nasrallah)
• Classical Studies Proseminar: Methods & Theories
• Graeco-Roman Medicine (co-taught with M. Buturović)
• Worlds of Homer (co-taught with E. Bakker)
• Medicine & Disease in Antiquity
• Directed Studies, Literature: Gilgamesh to Dante
• Ancient Greek Magic
• Ancient Greek L4/5: Attic Oratory & Litigation- Antiphon, Lysias, Demosthenes
• The Long Fourth Century: 404-272 BCE (co-taught with J. Manning)
• Methods & Problems in Greek History: 1400-300 BCE
• Ancient Greek L4/5: Greeks & Persians- Herodotus, Xenophon
• Life & Death in Ancient Athens
• Ancient Greek Festivals (+on-site Greece trip)
• Magic, Witchcraft, & Mystery Cults in Classical Antiquity
• Ancient Greek Medicine