“Women of the Ancient World” (WOAW) is a digital humanities project that takes advantage of the online medium in order to make ancient women and their lives visually real and immediately accessible to diverse public audiences.
Our graphic-novel style illustrations are richly detailed to draw the viewer into each woman’s world, and hyperlinks throughout the drawings lead to pop-ups, articles, and artifacts that showcase the textual and archaeological evidence behind the artist’s choices. This interactivity allows WOAW to move beyond the limitations of academic reconstructions in books and articles while drawing on scholarly expertise from such disparate sub-fields as international politics and trade, art and architecture, styles of dress and adornment, and the amuletic and apotropaic properties of makeup and jewelry.
The website also engages with critical scholarship on an ongoing basis via discussion forum in order to paint a holistic image of ancient women in various social, cultural, political, and historical circumstances, and to demonstrate how historians reconstruct the lives of people in the past.
WOAW is a product of ongoing collaborations between Shawna Dolansky and Sarah Malena. You can find our work-in-progress at woawhistory.com — check it out!
Follow us on Instagram: @woawhistory