Student and Early Careers Conference 2026: Katerina Konstantinidi
The Matter of Heroes: three cases of Homeric agency, materiality and personhood
Katerina Konstantinidi
The poster will demonstrate one notion of Homeric agency, materiality and personhood that emerged from my doctorate work (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, department of Archaeology). My research focused on things and their entanglements in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The divide between the Homeric material culture and the two epics as corpora of ancient literature is felt between archaeologist, historians, and philologists. Homeric material culture is rooted in prehistory, while Homeric texts are rooted in history. By omitting those restrictions, I tried to engage with Homeric material culture, through text, while respecting the cognitive experiences evoked by the latter. In summary, I explored how Homeric objects are imbued with notions of agency, how bodies experience the materiality of Homeric things, and how material entities (bodies, persons and things) define Homeric identities. In the proposed poster I will focus on three cases, one for each term (Homeric agency, Homeric materiality and Homeric personhood). I will present how Homeric objects threaten human existence, how matter is a limit or extension of Homeric bodies, and how Homeric persons embody traits from their hybrid environment. Each example will bridge anthropology and archaeology, with theory, Greek Late Bronze Age with Early Iron Age, Aegean prehistory and history.
Download the poster below:
Katerina Konstantinidi
Hello there! This is Katerina from Greece. I am an archaeologist and I hold a master’s degree in classical archaeology specialising in Early Iron Age Athens and recently (February 2026) I was awarded my PhD specialising in New Materialism and the Homeric Epics. Today, I am excited to share with all of you some highlights of my research. The close reading of the two epics and my training on theoretical and field archaeology allowed me to discover new interactions between Homeric persons and things. My research interests include cognitive archaeology and entanglements between human perception and material world.
