2019-20

Objects from Classical antiquity that have survived into the modern era have enticed, inspired, and haunted those who encountered or possessed them. Collectors, in turn, have charged ancient objects with emotional, spiritual, and temporal power, enrolling them in all aspects of their lives, from questions of politics and religion to those of race and sexuality. This course explores intimate histories of private ownership of antiquities as they appear within literature, visual art, theater, aesthetics, and collecting practices. Focusing on the sensorial, material and affective dimensions of collecting, we will survey histories of modern classicism that span from the 18th century to the present, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific. Historical sources will include the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Emma Hamilton, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among others, while secondary source scholarship will draw from the fields of gender studies, history of race, history of art, and the history of emotions. We will supplement our readings with occasional museum visits and film screenings. This course is team taught as an interdisciplinary course, and we welcome students from all backgrounds, with no previous experience in ancient art or modern history required. 

This quarter surveys the social, economic, and political history of Rome, from its prehistoric beginnings in the twelfth century BCE to the end of the Severan dynasty in 235 CE. Throughout, the focus is upon the dynamism and adaptability of Roman society, as it moved from a monarchy to a republic to an empire, and the implications of these political changes for structures of competition and cooperation within the community.

This course surveys the social, economic, and political history of Greece from prehistory to the Hellenistic period. The main topics considered include the development of the institutions of the Greek city-state, the Persian Wars and the rivalry of Athens and Sparta, the social and economic consequences of the Peloponnesian War, and the eclipse and defeat of the city-states by the Macedonians. 

 Empire was the dominant form of regional state in the ancient Mediterranean. We will investigate the nature of imperial government, strategies of administration, and relations between metropole and regional powers in Persia, Athens, the Seleucid empire, and Rome.

This course provides an introduction to the role of the human body in ancient Greek art. We will examine, on the one hand, the various ways in which Greek artists represented the body, and consider how forms of bodily identity such as gender and sexuality were constructed and articulated through artistic practice. But we will also consider the ways in which works of art themselves — statues, paintings, vessels — could function like bodies or in place of bodies, expanding the notion of what it means to be a living being. Readings will range from primary texts — ancient literature in translation — to more theoretical writing on embodiment, gender, and sexuality.

Is the market system a new invention linked to the recent development of modern European societies? Is the market the hero or the villain of the story? Is everything marketable? Is the market the driver for economic development? We will address these and other questions in a deliberately comparative way, focusing on the cases of ancient Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, as well as medieval and early modern Europe. We will read excerpts from Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Braudel, Wallerstein, Geertz, Horden, and Purcell. We will examine the controversies in which these scholars were involved and the echoes they still have in our own contemporary debates.
Course Requirements: two papers, two quizzes
Note: History Gateways are introductory courses meant to appeal to 1st- through 3rd-yr students who may not have done previous course work on the topic of the course; topics cover the globe and span the ages.

This course will travel through the great dramas of ancient Greece, including works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Moreover, it will show how the history of contemporary thought has been shaped by reflection on Greek tragedy, starting from the philosophy of Hegel and Nietzsche, the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, the feminist critiques of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, works of structuralism and poststructuralism, and finally the recent material and affective turns in scholarship. Along the way, we will draw insights on modern movements of the performance arts from adaptations, including those in dance (Martha Graham), in film (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lars von Trier), and in drama itself (Anne Carson). As this course will demonstrate, there is hardly an intellectual or artistic movement of recent history that has not taken its cue from Greek drama. All reading will be in English.

The Romans did not invent political strife, far from it, but they named the concept. Civil war (bellum civile) is technically formal war among citizens. Since antiquity, the Roman civil wars of the first century BCE, which brought the Roman Republic to the point of collapse, have been paradigmatic not only for the modern conceptualization of political discord, but for its narration. As Marx said of various stages of the French Revolution, it was fought in Roman garb, first of the Roman Republic, then of the Roman Empire. Despite the formal definition, ancient and modern tales of civil war typically turn on discord within the family, among the sexes, and in the cosmic order. Civil war comes to stand for pervasive social collapse. Beginning with Thucydides’ famous description of stasis on Corcyra, readings will encompass selections from Roman history (Caesar, Sallust, Velleius Paterculus, Tacitus), biography (Plutarch, Suetonius), Latin poetry (Horace, Propertius, Vergil, Seneca, Lucan), modern novels on civil war with Roman resonances (Victor Hugo, Michel Houellebecq), and articles on civil war from political science and conceptual history. Central questions will be repetition in history, whether civil war can ever come to an end, and whether its ghastly horror is constitutive of the political order and, if so, of what kind.