ABOUT
Women Who Went Before is a gynocentric quest into the ancient world. Come along as hosts Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley interview the world’s top scholars and unearth the history of women from the past. It’s a history podcast and detective journey in one, sifting through texts and tropes to find the women who lived beneath.
SEASONS
Season 1 asks the big questions: How did male authors use women’s stories for their own ends? How can we recover the women who lived and wrote and taught in the ancient Mediterranean? What spaces did women forge for themselves despite social and religious barriers? And why does this matter today?
Women have bodies. We live in them, and we experience the world through them. In Season 2, join us as we follow an ancient woman’s life cycle tracing her many embodied experiences. We’ll look at menstruating bodies, clothed bodies, birthing bodies, disabled bodies, violated bodies, raced bodies, erotic bodies, and ascetic bodies. For many women in antiquity, their sex and gender shaped both how they encountered the world and how the world encountered them—not unlike today.
MEET THE HOSTS
Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley host, write, produce, and edit the Women Who Went Before podcast. Both are PhD candidates at Princeton University.
The podcast emerged from an interdisciplinary reading group they organized in 2020-2021.
Rebekah Haigh
Rebekah specializes in Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity and is writing a dissertation that explores gendered piety and violence in the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient Judaism.
Emily Chesley
Emily researches the History of late antiquity, and her dissertation studies women’s social history in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the 5th through 8th centuries.
COLLABORATORS
Moses Sun composed and produced the podcast’s music.
Certain episodes were reviewed for accuracy by Jillian Marcantonio, Eliav Grossman, George A. Kiraz, and Emily G. Smith-Sangster.
Elio Lleo provided editing support.
SPONSORS
Season 1 of Women Who Went Before was funded by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University.
Season 2 was funded by Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity.
Preproduction of the podcast was made possible by the GradFUTURES New Media Studio and the inspiration of James M. Van Wyck.
The views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.
Image Credits
Header image: Seated woman playing a kithara. Detail of Roman fresco from Room H of the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale. Ca. 50–40 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1903, accession number 03.14.5.
Additional images, left to right: Portrait of a Young Woman in Red. Funerary portrait from Egypt. 90–120 CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1909, accession number 09.181.6.
Mother with child. Gold glass medallion probably from Egypt. Early 4th century CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917, accession number 17.190.109a.
Two women, one nursing a child. Painted limestone figurine from Middle or New Kingdom Egypt. Ca. 1981–1500 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1922, accession number 22.2.35.
Terracotta figurine of female bust. Terracotta figurine from Roman Syria. 3rd century CE. Yale University Art Gallery, Exchange with the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, Kurcoglu excavation, accession number 1940.623.
Mummy Portrait of an Old Woman, by St. Louis Painter. Funerary portrait from Egypt, 2nd century CE. Yale University Art Gallery, Ruth Elizabeth White Fund, accession number 2011.102.1.