Professor Alexandra Sofroniew will present her paper, “Did Votive Offerings Stop Working? The End of the ‘Votive Habit’ in Republican Italy,” at a conference at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on May 23.

The conference, “How It All Works: Ritual in the Ancient Mediterranean,” presents speakers who ask what can we know about whether and how the ancient Greeks and Romans thought their rituals accomplished anything? How did they think ritual worked? The conference explores the understudied question of the efficacy of ritual from the vantage point of various disciplines.