The Senior Seminar takes place over two quarters (autumn and winter) and students register for it as a single course in one of those two quarters. The Senior Seminar is a requirement for all Classics majors, whether they are writing a BA paper or not.
This course centers the objects of the ancient Greek world, from prehistory to the Hellenistic period, as avenues for exploring the practice, history, and motivations of the discipline of Greek archaeology. From the mundane to the spectacular, we will closely consider twenty things – pots, statues, coins, knives, bones, inscriptions, among others – whose compelling if fragmentary biographies and itineraries reveal how archaeologists reconstruct and explain ancient social lives. Discussions will interrogate histories of object analysis, identification, and interpretation; schemes of periodization and categorization; theories of gender, class, economy, politics, and religion; developments in technologies and aesthetics; the intersections of artifact discovery and museum or market acquisitions; and the making of Greek archaeology within the wider discipline.
Through close readings of Pausanias, who wrote a Description of Greece during the Roman imperial period, this course explores ancient forms of travel writing and associated interests in the places, peoples, myths, ruins, and material objects of the Mediterranean world. Moving from the apparent ethnographic lens of earlier Greek literature to Roman imperialist expeditions, readings and discussions will examine the sociopolitical contexts out of which Pausanias emerged as a literary author, and his legacies on and relationship to the wide array of genres of modern travel writing, from Lewis and Clark to John Steinbeck. Key topics will include: movement through space, tourism, nature, landscape, town and country, sites and spectacles, myth, ritual, and acts of remembering and forgetting.
Books have been a fundamental part of the transmission of knowledge and more generally, human communication. They collect thoughts, experiences, feelings, knowledge and ideas into a material artifact that is distributed to an audience of readers. The work of scribes and scholars is the silent agent of this millennial enterprise. The process of book-production involves a large number of different skills from these artisans: material manufacture, preparation of writing surfaces and inks, writing skills, calligraphy, binding, distribution. In this course students will study the history of books, from Antiquity to the invention of the printing press, and their makers. The topics covered will include scribal training, book manufacture, circulation and trade of books, readership, and other such topics around the world of books and scholars. The course will focus on books as artifacts, as transmitters of knowledge and literary creativity.
Dreams belong to the universals of human existence as human beings have always dreamt and will continue to dream across time and cultures. The questions where do dreams come from and how to unravel a dream have always preoccupied the human mind. In this course we will focus on dreams in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultural environments. We will cover dreams from three complementary perspectives: dreams as experience, dream interpretation and dream theory. The reading materials will include: (a) a selection of dream narratives from different sources, literary texts as well as documentary accounts of dreams; (b) texts which document the forms and contexts of dream interpretation in the Greco-Roman and Greco-Egyptian cultures and (c) texts which represent attempts to approach dreams from a more general perspective by among other explaining their genesis and defining dream-types.
This seminar examines the interplay between social and environmental actors, practices, and changes across time in the Mediterranean basin, as well as explores the study and analysis of those interactions from the beginnings of classical scholarship to the present. Key themes include: environmental determinism, human and non-human interactions, interpretive approaches to space and place, the role of science in archaeological and historical practice, and the compartmentalization of “environment” and “landscape” as analytic focus. These themes loom large now - during what might be called the “environmental turn” spurred on by the controversial Anthropocene in the humanities and social sciences - and their intensifying resonance provides the basis for critical reflection of past and future trends in classics, history, archaeology, and anthropology.
This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.
This course offers a hands-on introduction to the field of digital humanities with a special focus on ancient Greek and Roman antiquity. We will explore concepts and methods such as digital presentation of text with markup languages, text analysis with programmatic manipulation, map visualization, 3D modeling, and network analysis. Throughout the course, we will take a critical view of the existing online digital resources for Greek and Roman antiquity. The course will include weekly readings and assignments and conclude with a final research project.
No advanced computer skills are required. However, students are required to bring their own laptops to class.
Without the tractive force and accelerated motion afforded by horses much of what humans have achieved, for good or ill, would have been impossible. The horse has also been a steady economic, military, artistic, and literary reference, and linguists and historians have even begun accounts of human civilization with the horse. The course will trace the various forms of “symbiosis” that have united humans and horses since their first fateful linkage in Central Asia some 4,000 years ago, down to the rapid and almost complete de-coupling of the past 100 years.
Every culture has its wars, and Aristophanes’ Athens was certainly no exception. In this course, we will read selections of several Aristophanic comedies in Greek (Acharnians, Knights, Clouds, Frogs), and consider how these plays engage with a number of issues that were cultural flashpoints: the workings and ideologies of Athenian democracy, contemporary intellectual movements and education, attitudes towards the Peloponnesian War, shifting notions of Athenian and class identity, and the manner in which dramatic poetry itself – from Euripidean tragedy to Aristophanes’ own comedies – related to, or even exacerbated, these issues. Along the way, we will consider how contemporary comedians (e.g. Trevor Noah, Hari Kondabolu) continue to put to use the same techniques and dynamics that we see in Aristophanes’ plays, and to what effect(s).
