Ph.D. Lorena Pérez Yarza
Biography
I am a specialist in the religious epigraphy of the western part of the Roman Empire, with an interest in the religious interaction of specific population groups and the processes of religious expression and gods’ naming. In particular, I studied the dynamics of onomastic sequences in cross-cultural contexts and how dedicators tended to conceptualize the divine in inscriptions. I graduated in History (2013) and completed my MA (2014) at the University of Zaragoza, where I defended my PhD thesis (2019) with the title The Cult to Sol in the Western part of the Roman Empire. I have been a Jacobi fellow at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Munich (2019), a postdoctoral fellow Juan de la Cierva at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2021-2023), and an international WWU fellow at the Universität Münster (2023). Currently a member of the ERC project STONE-MASTERS project at UW, I am part of the HHR and Hiberus research groups and I have participated in the projects Processes of Religious Acculturation in the Ancient World and Colonial America (ARMAAC), Divine Epithets of Power in Hispania (DEPHIS) and Religion: The Individual and the Communitas (RICO). I am the scientific editor of the online database DEpHis (Divine Epithets in Hispania) and I have collaborated with the database of the ERC project MAP (Mapping Ancient Polytheisms) from the Université Toulouse – Jean Jaures. At UW, I am responsible for gathering the epigraphical data from the Western part of the Later Roman Empire, bundling the meaningful evidence into specific styles, attributing them to workshops or artisans and inputting the data into the Digital Atlas of Workshops in Epigraphy (DAWE).
Most important scholarly articles
Pérez Yarza, L. and Bonnet, C. (forthcoming 2024), “Divine Names and Bilingualism in Rome: Religious Dynamics in Multilingual Spaces”, in A. Palamidis, F. Porzia, and C. Bonnet (eds.) What’s in a divine name? Religious systems and human agency. De Gruyter.
Pérez Yarza, L. (2023), “Mitra en la Penumbra. “El Juego de luces y sombras en los altares perforados// Mithras in the Twilight”. The Play of Light and Shadow in the Perforated Altars”. ARYS, 21, pp. 253-287.
Pérez Yarza, L. (2023), “The Aztec Sun and its Mesoamerican Milieu from a Classical Mediterranean Perspective”, in F. Marco Simón and D.Ch. Wright-Carr (eds.), From Rome to Mexico: Religious Globalization in the Context of Empire. University Press of Colorado, pp. 89-116.
Pérez Yarza, L. (2021), El culto de Sol en el occidente romano. Series Historia, 381. Editorial Universidad de Sevilla.
Pérez Yarza, L. (2018), “Apollo as a precedent to the coinage of Sol Invictus”. Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 58, pp. 379-398.