National Borders and the Contours of Historical Knowledge

Travel—across political or cultural borders and into fresh social settings—is so often transformative because it brings us into direct contact with unfamiliar ways of thinking and doing and, through those confrontations, we find ourselves prompted to reflect anew on our own peculiarities, limitations, and even failures. I recently had just such an experience when attending the semi-annual meeting of the Association Internationale pour l’Étude de la Mosaïque Antique (AIEMA), which was held in Lyon and Saint-Romain-en-Gal, France from October 17–21, 2022.¹ As a scholar trained primarily in textual sources for the study of religion in the ancient Mediterranean world, I am relatively new to the field of mosaic studies and thus came to the conference as something of an outsider. I knew that being a neophyte in a professional setting always has its challenges, but I was nonetheless excited to engage with the well-established community of art historians and...