Ragnar.hedlund@antiken.uu.se

CV

Since August 1st, I am employed as a researcher, funded by the Swedish Research Council, for a 3-year project with the title ”Propaganda and dialogue - visual media and societies in the Roman imperial age”. This project builds on the research I did as a ph D. student on the iconography of Roman imperial coins, and which I presented in April 2008 in the doctoral thesis, “…and achieved nothing worthy of memory”: authority, legitimacy and coinage in the Roman empire, c. AD 260-295 (digitally published under the following link: http://publications.uu.se/theses/abstract.xsql?dbid=8511, under “fulltext.” In this thesis, I studied the third century A.D., which was a turbulent age in the Roman empire. The stability and unity of the empire was threatened by internal and external conflicts. Some of the emperors during this age died in battle; others were killed by the soldiers loyal to other claimants to the imperial purple, or – in the worst case – by their own soldiers when these mutineered. How did this come to happen?
In my doctoral thesis, I studied how the emperors of this age tried to argue in favour of their power with propaganda in various visual media, most eminently coin-images. I propose that the various detailed images that can be seen on coins struck in the second half of the 3rd century A.D. were intended to function as a kind of monuments in miniature: in a situation when the emperors did not have the time or possibility to erect triumphal arches or create other more elaborate expressions for their power, they tried to to use coins to a greater extent to argue in favour of imperial authority. An important reason for the long period of crisis was that the Roman empire underwent drastic geopolitical changes in the mid-third century A.D. The centres of political gravity were moving: the emperor cound no longer rule from the city of Rome. Still, this city was of an important symbolical significance, and the emperors therefore were forced to continue acknowledging this significance. This was one of the problems the soldier-emperors were facing. The idea that the coins functioned as a kind of monuments could also be connected with this: the image of imperial power needed to be spread to new locations. These coin-images form a crucial link in the chain of developments through which the city of Rome is replaced first by the cities of Trier, Milan, Thessalonica and Nicomedia, and then by Constantinople, as the centre of the empire.
Since I defended my doctoral thesis I have been a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish Institute in Rome, funded by the Fondazione Famiglia Rausing. At the Swedish Institute in Rome, I was co-organizer of the workshop Iconography and Economy in antiquity.
In my present project, I focus more closely on the issue of how ”propaganda” is formed. In the roman empire, large parts of imperial ”propaganda” is directed by actors other than the imperial authority. What does this tell us of the position of such actors in Roman society and of the formation of that society? Can the ”ideology” of roman society be regarded as something which evolves from the relations between these different actors, rather than something which is always conceived by the imperial authorities?
I am also interested in issues of how various heritages from classical antiquity have been used in later history for the construction of various social and political identities, above all in museums. I am also involved in the Swedish archaeological excavations in Labraunda in soutwestern Turkey; see www.labraunda.org.