Graduate

The Coptic versions of the Bible present one of the earliest translations of Christian scripture as the new religion spread. Understanding how the Bible (canonical and non-canonical) was read and used in Egypt at this early stage implies studying the development of Christian communities in those agitated times, as well as paying attention to questions of literacy and linguistic environment, book production, Bible (both Greek and Coptic) on papyrus, and translation and interpretation in Antiquity. The course will draw on materials assembled from my work on the critical edition of the Gospel of Mark, but will also look into other materials like the Coptic Old Testament, and non-canonical scriptures such as Nag Hammadi and the Gnostic scriptures. No previous knowledge of Coptic is required. A brief introduction to the Coptic language will be part of the class, and parallel sessions of additional language instruction will be planned for those who are interested in learning more.

What explains the diverse developments of social and economic inequality in the ancient world, and why are historians and archaeologists so interested in this question? In this seminar, we begin by thinking about key terms related to inequality – class, status, and wealth - and how scholars in ancient history and archaeology identify and distinguish evidence for these practices, analyze their data, and produce comparative analyses of past societies, using the Mediterranean as a case study. Readings will introduce important ideas from economic and sociological understandings of how value, and access to things of value and the means of making it, might have constructed and maintained forms of difference, power, and cultural capital. The course will explore evidence of inequality by sampling from a wide range of societies, from the Bronze Age to the Roman Empire, to assess how uneven practices of production, accumulation, and consumption shaped social lives.

Stoicism and Epicureanism became two major strands of philosophy after Aristotle and attracted many followers. They are fundamentally opposed. The Stoics believed in an immanent deity who issued moral laws to humans. They were also the first to develop a robust theory of cosmopolitanism and natural law. The Epicureans rejected divine governance, leaving it up to humans to achieve their own happiness by following the goal of pleasure. Much derided as hedonists, they sought to purify the quest for pleasure by understanding the height of pleasure as the absence of pain. Surprisingly, both groups discovered in time that had something in common. This course will examine their differences and interactions in Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as trace the impact of both philosophies in modern times.  

Islands, and Mediterranean islands in particular, have long provoked curiosity and intrigue, and have persisted as places for thinking about utopia, incongruity, distinctiveness, or backwardness since antiquity. This seminar course interrogates the representations of islands in ancient thought as well as their own archaeological and historical records in order to trace their often elliptical categorization in modern scholarship. Are islands unique because they are isolated, or rather because they become crossroads of special interaction? From the mythical island of the Cyclopes, to the Aegean archipelagos, to the large masses like Sicily or Cyprus, discussions will explore approaches to insularity, isolation, connectivity, and identity using a wide range of textual and material evidence and theoretical insights from geography, anthropology, history, literature, and environmental science.  

 From the strong, rapid fourteeners of Chapman’s Elizabethan English to the taut rhythms of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Homer’s Iliad takes on new meaning and feel each time the poem is translated anew. This workshop-style course will engage the many English versions of Homeric poetry, attending to theme, image, word, line, paragraph, and meter; noting what is kept and what is changed. We will also consider the theory and practice of translation, especially as it has been understood by these poets over the last four centuries. No knowledge of Greek is required.

The course will study processes of democratic erosion and collapse in classical Athens and republican Rome. Assignments: in-class presentations and a long paper. 

From Herodotos to Hitler, ancient Sparta has continued to fascinate for its supposedly balanced constitution, its military superiority, its totalitarian ideology and its brutality. Yet the image we possess of the most important state of the Peloponnese is largely the projection of outside observers for whom the objectification of Sparta could serve either as a model for emulation or as a paradigm of "otherness." This course will examine the extant evidence for Sparta from its origins through to its repackaging in Roman times and beyond and will serve as a case-study in discussing the writing of history and in attempting to gauge the viability of a non-Athenocentric Greek history. Assignments: short papers.

This two-quarter seminar introduces students to key debates and challenges in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies outside or elliptical to the boundaries of the city-state. In the first half, readings and discussions will interrogate Greek and Roman concepts of territoriality and border-making, frontiers and hinterlands, and political community, as well as assess limitations in method and evidence for studying the material histories of nonurban social formations. The course takes a broad approach by exploring diverse regional and chronological case studies. In the second quarter, students will write a major research paper. Non-Classics students may enroll for just the first quarter by arrangement with the instructors. C. Kearns/C. Ando.  Winter.

This two-quarter seminar introduces students to key debates and challenges in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies outside or elliptical to the boundaries of the city-state. In the first half, readings and discussions will interrogate Greek and Roman concepts of territoriality and border-making, frontiers and hinterlands, and political community, as well as assess limitations in method and evidence for studying the material histories of nonurban social formations. The course takes a broad approach by exploring diverse regional and chronological case studies. In the second quarter, students will write a major research paper. Non-Classics students may enroll for just the first quarter by arrangement with the instructors.

This course will introduce undergraduates to the Greco-Roman sources of a key tension that has shaped contemporary humanities: the debate between philosophy and rhetoric, between ideals of truth and powers of persuasion. Beginning with an in-depth examination of Plato’s scathing attack on rhetoric in the Gorgias, a deeply ambiguous text in which Socrates’ championing of philosophy actually seems to fail, we will examine Plato’s rehabilitation of rhetoric in the Phaedrus as a means of leading souls towards truth, Cicero’s attempt to combine rhetoric and philosophy in Book III of his dialogue On the Orator, and Quintilian’s effort to inspire moral commitment in the readers of his rhetorical treatise On the Education of the Orator.  In the latter part of the course, we will encounter new voices entering the debate and adding their own unique concerns: Augustine’s conflicted feelings towards his rhetorical education in the Confessions, Isotta Nogarola’s spirited entrance into a tradition of rhetorical and philosophical debate defined and dominated by men, and Petrus Ramus’ attack on the unity of rhetoric and morality that dramatically altered the shape of humanistic studies.  We will conclude the course with Danielle Allen’s chapter “Rhetoric, a Good Thing” in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education,  which engages in this debate via Aristotle and frames rhetoric as a useful tool for forging civic bonds in troubled political times.