CLCV

From rapacious bird-women to a serpent-haired petrifactrix, monstrous women pervade ancient Greco-Roman mythology. Why are so many women portrayed as monsters or monstrous? In a 2013 essay, classicist Debbie Felton wrote these monstrous women “all spoke to men’s fear of women’s destructive potential. The myths then, to a certain extent, fulfill a male fantasy of conquering and controlling the female.” In a word, misogyny. In this course, we will interrogate the mutual influence of monstrousness and misogyny in ancient Greek and Roman mythology and its legacy in the intervening millennia. Through critical analysis of ancient source materials and their modern reception, we will explore and evaluate the monstrosity and misogyny of three case studies from ancient Greco-Roman mythology and its reception: Medea, the Furies, and Medusa. We will ask questions such as: how does mythologizing and storytelling encode cultural expectations onto women; how has media been used to support and subvert the patriarchy; what role does intersectionality play in Greco-Roman female monstrosity; how have monstrous women in Greco-Roman mythology influenced modern feminist and critical theory? We will also explore monstrous women in antiquity beyond Greco-Roman mythology, including monstrous portrayals of real women in Greco-Roman antiquity and depictions of monstrous women from other ancient cultures. Students will be assessed through regular discussion and/or blog posts, reflection writings, quizzes, a midterm essay, and a final project. The final project will allow students to synthesize and apply their knowledge with a topic of their own choice from Greco-Roman or other world mythologies in an analytic and/or creative format of their choice, such as a short podcast series, a digital museum exhibit, or a piece of creative writing.

CW: gender- and race-based violence, sexual violence, graphic violence, murder, incest, bestiality, child and animal abuse, suicide, domestic abuse.

In 330, the Roman emperor Constantine dedicated a city named after himself at the site of ancient Byzantion. It was also designated as New Rome and became the capital of the eastern Roman empire for the next thousand years; it subsequently served as the capital of the Ottoman empire, and today it the modern city of Istanbul. This course will explore the factors that led to the creation of Constantinople, the monuments with which it was first equipped, and the ideological reasons why the emperors chose to build a “branch-office” of Rome in the east. As the new city’s people originated mostly in the provinces, considerable migration internal to the empire must have taken place. How were these thousands of people supported and fed? Finally, the city’s monuments alluded both to those of Rome and to ancient mythology. The emperors spoke through art to their Greek Roman subjects in the east. In this course, we will learn to decode these artistic conventions against a background politics of demography, war, and food supply. 

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.

The excavation of ancient ruins – Troy, Machu Picchu, and others – in the 19^th and 20^th centuries solidified the academic discipline of classical studies. In Europe and the Americas (the “Western” world), these discoveries came to symbolize a modern period that celebrated “the classics.” Beginning with Heinrich Schliemann’s interactions with Troy and the Homeric epics in the 1970s, in this course we read classical ruins and texts (Homer, lyric poetry, Greek drama) with a view toward the various meanings they have generated in modern times. We survey classical reception studies for its attentiveness to the role of Greek and Roman antiquity in Western conceptions of national identity, race, gender and sexuality, and the performance of these onstage, in public spaces, and in personhood. Readings in English, course culminates in research paper. No prerequisite required.

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. 

This course will examine some of the ancient Greek roots of early Christianity. We will focus on affinities between Christianity and the classical tradition as well as ways in which the Christian faith may be considered radically different from it. Some of the more important issues that we will analyze are: "The spell of Homer." How the Homeric poems exerted immeasurable influence on the religious attitudes and practices of the Greeks. The theme of creation in Greek and Roman authors such as Hesiod and Ovid. The Orphic account of human origins. The early Christian theme of Christ as Creator/Savior. Greek, specifically Homeric conceptions of the afterlife. The response to the Homeric orientation in the form of the great mystery cults of Demeter, Dionysus, and Orpheus. The views of the philosophers (esp. Plato) of the immortality of the soul compared with the New Testament conception of resurrection of the body. Ancient Greek conceptions of sacrifice and the crucifixion of Christ as archetypal sacrifice. The attempted synthesis of Jewish and Greek philosophic thought by Philo of Alexandria and its importance for early Christianity. 

The five continents of the Modern World are multilingual areas, some countries even have more than one official language. Individuals in different communities use daily two or three languages to communicate at home and in society. The same was true in the Ancient World. The Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, Africa, Asia, the Ancient Americas, were the stage of different cultures and languages, many of them lost forever, others surviving in written sources and transmitted literature. In this class we will explore the types of sources we have for the study of ancient languages, methods to study them, the decipherment of lost languages and writing systems, and the application of modern linguistics to dead languages. We will also study the approach that the ancients had to their own languages and the languages of the other, and the different sociolinguistic situations of multilingual spaces in Antiquity, with a special emphasis on the Mediterranean.

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.