Courses

This graduate seminar serves as an introductory survey of the range of evidentiary categories, methods, and main interpretive frameworks used by practitioners in the field of ancient historical studies. We will chart the development of historiographical ideas and techniques of analysis of texts and material culture, as well as discuss some of the critical approaches to ancient history in practice today. Key topics will include frameworks like positivism, determinism, and (post)structuralism; dating, periodization, and scale; culture history; economic history; cliometrics and big data analyses; social history and studies of gender and the everyday; eurocentrism and postcolonialism; and methods drawn from e.g. epigraphy, papyrology, archaeology, and art history. Assignments will center on the crafting of original research projects and the practice of historiographical writing. The course focuses on the ancient Mediterranean but is open to MA and PHD students from any field.

This seminar will study claims to Roman identity across cultures, regions, and periods. Who belonged to the Roman community at any time and who was excluded? How did foundation narratives, asylum, conquest, the expansion of citizenship, notions of ethnicity, processes of assimilation, and the passage of time shape the contours of groups who saw themselves as Roman? Literature in many genres and languages, and over many centuries, addresses these questions. The course will not be limited to the ancient Roman experience but will expand to include claims in the medieval West and especially the eastern Roman empire, aka Byzantium. A self-defined Roman community persisted there longer than elsewhere, in fact down to the present. Selected claims to be the new Romans in the medieval and modern West will also be examined. Students will read and discuss original sources (in Greek and Latin, depending on their language skills) and modern scholarship. MA students and undergraduate students (by instructor permission) are welcome.

The seminar will include substantial reading of original texts, and will result in an extended research paper, to be completed in the Winter term.

This seminar will study claims to Roman identity across cultures, regions, and periods. Who belonged to the Roman community at any time and who was excluded? How did foundation narratives, asylum, conquest, the expansion of citizenship, notions of ethnicity, processes of assimilation, and the passage of time shape the contours of groups who saw themselves as Roman? Literature in many genres and languages, and over many centuries, addresses these questions. The course will not be limited to the ancient Roman experience but will expand to include claims in the medieval West and especially the eastern Roman empire, aka Byzantium. A self-defined Roman community persisted there longer than elsewhere, in fact down to the present. Selected claims to be the new Romans in the medieval and modern West will also be examined. Students will read and discuss original sources (in Greek and Latin, depending on their language skills) and modern scholarship.

This is a continuation of CLAS 43226. This quarter is reserved for the researching and writing by students of article-length seminar papers, and we will meet regularly to workshop the papers-in-progress.