Graduate

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.

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. 

Aristophanes' comedy The Frogs is perhaps the most profound - and it is certainly by far the funniest - meditation on the meaning and significance of tragedy to have reached us from  ancient Greece. Staged shortly after the deaths of Sophocles and Euripides, and during the last years before the catastrophic conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, Aristophanes' brilliantly comic play asks what kinds of tragedy are most and least beneficial to the city and indeed whether the city can survive at all without tragedy. His answer is of continuing interest for our own reflections on the question of the survival of our studies, and of our society, in today's world.

The goal of this course is to pick up habits from introductory Greek class: producing Attic Greek sentences and longer pieces. The most obvious benefits of this exercise will be thorough review of basic morphology and syntax as well as fine-tuning our grasp of the more subtle nuances of the language, which should pay off when we go back to reading the ancient Greek texts themselves — or teach them! While this is a graduate level course, undergraduates are welcome to petition to take it.

A study of the creation of the canonical Greek prose style in the 5th and 4th centuries. Rapid reading and translation exercises.

This course will cover the long life of ancient Greek poetry, touching on many genres in their first forms: epic and hymns, didactic, theogonic, iambic, elegiac, lyric, epinician, tragic, comedic, pastoral, dithyrambic poetry, and poems that are practically unclassifiable. We will seek to discuss key moments, passages, and poems that give entry to larger literary questions and themes. We will pay particular attention to details of genre, dialect, and meter, while also being attentive to the history of scholarship that attends on these traditions. We will read some secondary literature and a lot of Greek. 

These two orators were fierce rivals in Athens; the luck of textual transmission allows us to read both of them smearing the other, and to explore what apparently passed for valid argument in the Athenian lawcourts. Demosthenes produced his finest work in attacking Aeschines; in this class we will explore both men’s writings in depth.