Graduate

We will read the entire play, focusing on syntax, religious ideas and scansion of the iambic trimeter.

We read the text of the historian in Greek and contextualize his contribution to the classical period, with some discussion of his perspectives on the past, people, and artifacts he records.

The corpus of Greek literature transmitted in medieval manuscripts presents a notable lacuna in the field of poetry. However, the discovery of the Egyptian papyri in the 19th century and after have provided a new entry to this lost literary corpus. These discoveries open interesting questions about the formation of the canon and about how we have understood and misunderstood ancient literature. This course will approach the corpus of lost and found Greek poetry from two points of view: on the one hand, that of its textual and material transmission, and on the other, that of its literary value. It will include technical training in papyrology, a general overview of textual tradition, and discussions of specific poetic and scholarly traditions, including (potentially) that of Homer, Archilochus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Timotheus, Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus and Posidippus.

The corpus of Greek literature transmitted in medieval manuscripts presents a notable lacuna in the field of poetry. However, the discovery of the Egyptian papyri in the 19th century and after have provided a new entry to this lost literary corpus. These discoveries open interesting questions about the formation of the canon and about how we have understood and misunderstood ancient literature. This course will approach the corpus of lost and found Greek poetry from two points of view: on the one hand, that of its textual and material transmission, and on the other, that of its literary value. It will include technical training in papyrology, a general overview of textual tradition, and discussions of specific poetic and scholarly traditions, including (potentially) that of Homer, Archilochus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Simonides, Timotheus, Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus and Posidippus.  

How are democracies established and maintained? What are their advantages and disadvantages with respect to stability, security, liberty, equality, and justice? Why do democracies decline and die? This course addresses these questions by examining democracies, republics, and popular governments in Ancient and Medieval/ Renaissance Europe. We will read and discuss primary texts from, and social scientific analyses of, Athenian democracy, the Roman Republic, and the Florentine commune. 

In this course we will mainly focus on the magical rituals (e.g. curses, necromancy, erotic spells, amulets, and divination) practiced in the ancient Mediterranean beginning with the Greeks in archaic times and ending with the fall of the Roman Empire.  Course requirements include a midterm and final, both with essay questions. 

Corpus research used to mean collecting data by hand by copying examples from texts onto index cards, or consulting indices to particular authors and works to collect examples. Digital text corpora allow us to query large corpora, and to develop our own corpora to suit our particular research questions. This course introduces students to Digital Philology in the Classics, arguably the most flourishing sector of the Digital Humanities. Students will do a combination of readings from secondary literature, ‘lab work’ to suit their own research interests, and present a final project. This course is open to undergraduates and graduates.

Ralph Ellison’s landmark 1952 Invisible Man won an American Book Award and entered discussions about the Great American Novel, and it was also steeped in Greek heroic myth and epic poetry. In this course, we begin with Invisible Man as a watershed in contemporary deployment of classical texts and images. We read these texts (the novel, its classical counterparts) and seek to understand their significance in the lives of writers, artists, and everyday people. We read the scholarship of classical reception studies as a global phenomenon impacting our understanding of the classics in the contemporary world. Reading in English, course culminates in research paper. No prerequisite required.

We can learn a lot about ancient societies through careful study of how they treated their dead. From the carrion picking over human corpses in the opening lines of the Iliad to the vast subterranean catacombs of Rome, ancient Mediterranean peoples have left us fascinating testimonies about death in literature, documents, objects, materials, and built environments that yield powerful clues to shifting values about personhood, belief, ritual, and family connections. In this seminar, we survey a range of evidence to explore how scholars study the practices of death and burial that operated across the Mediterranean in antiquity, and their connections to ways of dying, mourning, and commemoration in the Mediterranean present. Discussions will consider how fragmentary evidence can speak to a number of critical social themes: ritual and ideas of the afterlife, social bounding and othering, gender and bodily identity, demography and disease, wealth and status, and the persistent ways that dead bodies, tombs, and mortuary monuments shape social lives across generations.

The change from nonparent to parent is one of the few common and transformative instances in a human life, often bringing with it other essential changes to values, priorities, and potentially to a person’s sense of identity. Parenthood is frequently said to change a person’s relations to the world and other people, as well as to their sense of temporality. Both ancient and modern works of literary and performance arts are filled with examples of the extremes that parenting can produce: deep love, self-abnegation and self-sacrifice, as well as vengeance, murder and forbidden desires. How is the identity of both parent and child shaped through the intensity of this relationship? How does each seek to inhabit and escape from this bond? How are the paradigms and potentials for human behavior established through this crucible? In this course, we will examine these questions through ancient and modern works of poetry, theater, fiction and film. All readings will be in English.