We welcome suggestions of new sites and collections to add to our growing list, as well as ideas for seminar topics and speakers.

To find out more about the Gods’ Collections project, email Crispin Paine on crispinpaine1@gmail.com or Jessica Hughes on jessica.hughes@open.ac.uk

Crispin Paine was for a good many years a social history curator, and later advisor and consultant to museums quite widely. Always interested in how religion and things interact, his publications include Godly Things: Museums, Objects and Religion (2000), Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties (2013), Religion in Museums: Global and Multidisciplinary Perspectives (with Gretchen Buggeln and Brent Plate, 2018) and Gods and Rollercoasters: Religion in Theme Parks Worldwide (2019). In 2019, too, he became a Visiting Fellow at the Open University.

Jessica Hughes is a senior lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. Much of her recent research has focused on the changing religious landscape of the southern Italian region of Campania, and especially the area around Vesuvius. Her publications include Votive Body Parts in the Greek and Roman World (2017), Sensual Religion (2018, with Graham Harvey) and Remembering Parthenope: Classical Naples from Antiquity to the Present (2015, with Claudio Buongiovanni). With Emma-Jayne Graham, she co-hosts The Votives Project network (www.thevotivesproject.org). She is also the current director of The Baron Thyssen Centre for the Study of Ancient Material Religion (www.openmaterialreligion.org).

Header image: Site of the Iron Age/Roman temple on Hayling Island, Hants. Photograph by Crispin Paine.