Welcome!
Hello and a warm welcome to my homepage! My name is Jens Fischer, and I am currently a postdoctoral researcher in the field of Ancient History at the University of Potsdam, located close to Germany's lively capital, Berlin. On these few pages, you will find all the most important information about me and my work. If you want to know something more or are interested in any kind of collaboration, please do not hesitate to contact me!
My Research Interests
I would describe myself as a cultural historian of ancient Greek and Roman religion, with a specific focus on religious beliefs and the media through which they were disseminated and preserved. My main research centers on religious poetry, particularly religious pseudepigraphy, that is, texts that derived a special kind of authority from their ascription to mythical figures. Rather than engaging in a philological reconstruction of these texts, I am more concerned with how their authority operated within ancient discourses. I investigate how religious beliefs were spread, preserved, and mediated through both oral and written forms, and how they shaped society, culture, and politics. Central to my research are questions such as: Who produced these texts? How did political and cultural authorities interact with them? What roles did they play within communities? What relationships did they have with broader cultural and religious practices? And what was their influence on political and social transformations?
My Research So Far
In 2021, I completed my PhD thesis on the role played by the Sibylline Oracles and the god Apollo during the crisis of the Late Roman Republic and the early years of the Augustan Principate. In my thesis, I challenge the commonly held view that Apollo was Augustus's personal patron deity. Instead, I argue that Apollo had a close and long-standing relationship with one of Rome's most powerful priesthoods, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis, which was responsible for the famous Sibylline Books. These books contained oracles with politically significant messages that had the potential to be widely circulated among the Roman population. During the Republican period, the priests had firm control over these oracles. However, due to the political struggles of the Late Republic, the priesthood lost control, and the oracles were repeatedly exploited by conflicting political factions. Augustus regained control of the oracles by reuniting the priesthood and placing the books in a small library inside the Temple of Apollo on the Palatine, right next to his private quarters, which was newly built specifically for this purpose. In sum, my work offers a complete reassessment not only of the role of the Sibylline Books in Late Republican and Augustan Rome, but also of the function the god Apollo held for the first emperor. The monograph was published in 2022 in the well-respected series Studien zur Alten Geschichte by the established German publishing house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht (Verlag Antike), now owned by Brill. In addition, I have also worked on the role of the sanctuary of Delphi for the Roman Republic and the connection between pagan Sibylline Oracles and their Judeo-Christian counterparts, the Oracula Sibyllina.
Current Project
Shortly after the publication of my PhD thesis, I was fortunate to receive a generous research grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) for my postdoctoral project titled "Göttliche Botschaften aus sterblicher Feder – Pseudepigraphische Orakel und ihre Verbreiter im Athen des 6. bis 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr." (Divine Messages from Mortal Pen: Pseudepigraphic Oracles and their Disseminators in Athens from the 6th to 4th Century BCE). This project builds on the findings of my PhD thesis but greatly expands its scope. Its aim is to analyze how pseudepigraphic oracles and other religious poetry attributed to mythical authors such as Orpheus, Musaios, Bakis, the Sibyl, Epimenides, Abaris, Aristeas, and others were embedded in Greek, particularly Athenian, culture and society from the 6th to the 4th century BCE, and what influence they exerted on contemporary developments. The chronological focus of this study is the emergence of Athenian democracy and its first major crisis, the Peloponnesian War. A better understanding of the religious media at the center of my study, and how their specific role in ancient discourse influenced the culture and politics of this first and most prominent democracy in human history, is of significant interdisciplinary interest.
Outlook
In the future, I aim to broaden the scope of my research by seeking collaborations in adjacent fields such as Religious Studies, Sociology, and Social Anthropology. I am particularly interested in exploring the role, function, and influence of ancient divination, oracles, and prophetic texts from a cross-cultural and diachronic perspective.
Dr. Jens Fischer | Email: fischerj@uni-potsdam.de
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