Jessica Lamont, assistant professor of classics at Yale University, has been awarded the 2025 James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of American. She was honored for her book, In Blood and Ashes: Curse Tablets and Binding Spells in Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2023). Considered the organization’s highest annual honor, the prize recognizes outstanding scholarly work published in the preceding four years.
Drawing from epigraphic, literary, archaeological, and material evidence, In Blood and Ashes is the first historical study of ritualized curse practice in ancient Greece from 750-250 BCE. The monograph is Dr. Lamont’s first published book. She is currently writing her second book, Health and Healing in Ancient Greece, which discusses the emergence of medical pluralism in ancient Greek communities.
At Yale, Dr. Lamont is the director of undergraduate studies in classics and co-chair of ARCHAIA: the Yale Program for the Study of Global Antiquity. She holds a courtesy appointment with the history department and is a member of the program in the history of science and medicine. As a social and cultural historian of the ancient Greek world, her scholarship focuses on Greek religion, medicine, and magic, as well as the study of ancient Greek women. She has spent more than a decade as a field archaeologist at sites in Greece and other areas around the Mediterranean.
Dr. Lamont received her bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary in Virginia and her Ph.D. in classics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.