CLAS

Augustine’s City of God is a major work of history, politics, and religion. Written after Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410, the work begins an apology (justification) of the Empire’s turn to Christianity and expands to offer a sweeping and deeply theological account of human history and society in terms of earth-bound versus heaven-centered community. Augustine’s citizenship and politics entails living out membership in either fellowship while commingled on earth with the other. Augustine analyzes Roman history and politics as well as the new religion first encouraged and eventually imposed in the wake of Constantine’s conversion.
We shall read the entire work in translation, attending to historical observations, political stances, and religious views. Augustine made arguments of his own but saved huge swaths of Varro and other otherwise lost sources to fashion his historical critique of Rome, social analysis, and many ultimately fresh views on matters like human sexuality in paradise and in heaven.
The class will meet once a week. A supplementary Latin reading group will also convene once a week for close reading of important and demanding selections in the original. There will be some invited international guest speakers.

There will be a weekly Latin reading group (F. afternoon, 90 minutes) for classics and other students who want to tackle Augustine's Latin.

This course traces the emergence of geographic thought in the Mediterranean world and the diachronic representations of space and place that became the foundations for the humanistic and social science of geography. Discussions will examine the practices that led to diverse modes and styles of spatial expression, travel and mapping, the tensions between the known world and the exotic imagined other, and the political, social, and cultural dimensions of geographic works and their historic contexts. Beyond our sustained focus on Strabo, writing under the Roman Empire, we will explore and interrogate both earlier and later traditions, from Hecataeus and Herodotus to Dionysius and Pausanias.

This course will explore how the poets and philosophers of archaic and classical Greece conceptualized “being alone,” particularly insofar as solitude occasioned both unparalleled achievements and unique dangers (both for the individual and the community.) We will read portions of Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, together with excerpts of ancient philosophy, with an aim of thinking through the relationship between individual and community, which is fraught with tension in so many time periods and cultures. We will also reconsider our understanding of the ancient Greeks as primarily “public” in their motivations and values, in light of the array of possibilities offered by solitude in many of these texts. 

Aristotle called human beings “political animals,” suggesting an inherent connection between politics and the human propensity to live in cities. Using the city of Rome as its focus, this course aims to deepen our understanding of how urban spaces are not just backdrops to history but fundamentally shape political power. Focusing on the late Republic and early empire, in the first half of the class we will debate how the Roman forum, Campus Martius, and imperial fora altered the possibilities for political activity—from large public assemblies to restricted, autocratic displays focused on the emperor. We will also explore how “private” or seemingly “apolitical” spaces, such as houses and theaters, were used for the demonstration and negotiation of political and social power. This course will encourage students to use a variety of methodologies and source materials, from literary sources to digital archaeology, to construct arguments about the relationships between politics and space. We will also discuss how the lessons of Rome can be applied to battles over the landscapes of modern US cities. 

In recent decades, scholars of biblical and early Christian literature have examined the various ways literary sources constructed the relationship between “Jews” and “Christians” in Late Antiquity. These resources prove challenging for reconstructing the situation on the ground. This course will introduce students to the various models that scholars have advanced for making sense of the evidence and debated categories such as “Jewish-Christianity.” Against this backdrop, students will undertake a close reading of a select, representative examples to examine the development of adversus Iudaeos (“against the Jews”) literature. The readings will focus our attention on evidence from Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians living within the multilingual and religiously diverse regions at the boundary of the Roman and Sassanian Persian Empires. Familiar sources such as the Pauline epistles, Apostolic Fathers, and John Chysostom will be accompanied by readings from the pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, poetry, and Persian Martyr Acts. We will explore how new discoveries within Syriac studies are currently reshaping our approaches to traditional questions. 

This course will examine both the historical record and the literary imagination in order to gain insight into the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome. In both societies, women were a highly marginalized group, albeit in different ways. In this course, we will look at the forms of marginalization and the (male) anxieties that led to them, but we will give particular attention to the manner in which women were able to assert themselves and take agency in various social, civic, and religious spheres. Readings will all be in English, and will focus on both the everyday lives of women in the Greco-Roman world and on those of certain elite women. 

This course examines how the human body was represented and conceptualized in ancient Greek art and literature. Moving through three themed units ­– Objects and Bodies, Gender and Sexuality through the Senses, and Fragile Bodies – we will consider how concepts of embodiment were constructed and articulated in a range of social and spatial contexts, including sanctuaries, drinking parties, grave sites, and battlefields. A central goal of this course is to bring together two types of evidence – material objects and written sources – from classical antiquity that are traditionally studied apart. Through primary texts (in translation), discussions of objects, and museum visits, we will develop strategies for thinking across methodological divides and between word and image to arrive at a richer, more textured understanding of the body in ancient Greece. 

This seminar questions the prerogatives of disciplines in framing and explaining social change via mobility. Following earlier theories of diffusion to understand diachronic cultural change, and the subsequent contextual critiques that privilege historical contingencies and human agency, advances in identifying past human movement through techniques like ancient DNA genome testing have increasingly led to the revival of migration as a subject of focus and explanation. As growing interest in contemporary refugee and forced migration studies is showing, migration represents not just a wide-ranging practice of different types, but is a semantically charged and ambiguous term whose recent applications provide new opportunities to assess its interpretive advantages and limitations. Is the new empirical emphasis on migration re-racializing antiquity? What do we gain by studying concepts of diasporas, transnationalism, and border crossings in the premodern world? Why does migration matter? Divided into two parts, the course covers the conceptual and theoretical work in current literature on migration as well as applications to specific historical problems from ancient and modern Eurasia. (Meeting Fridays from 1:30-4:20pm in JRL TBA Enrollment Limit: 18)

A workshop for students who have completed coursework and qualifying exams, it aims to provide practical assistance and a collaborative environment for students preparing the dissertation prospectus. It will meet bi-weekly for two quarters. S. Torallas Tovar Autumn, Winter.

Ancient Greek tragedy has been of continuous interest to philosophers, whether they love it or hate it.  But they do not agree about what it is and does, or about what insights it offers.  This seminar will study the tragic festivals and a select number of tragedies, also consulting some modern studies of ancient Greek tragedy.  Then we shall turn to philosophical accounts of the tragic genre, including those of Plato, Aristotle, the Greek and Roman Stoics (especially Seneca), Lessing, Schlegel, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Iris Murdoch, Sartre, and Bernard Williams. If we have time we will include some study of ancient Greek comedy and its philosophical significance. M. Nussbaum. Autumn.