CLAS

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.

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. 

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.  

This two-quarter seminar introduces students to key debates and challenges in the study of ancient Mediterranean societies outside or elliptical to the boundaries of the city-state. In the first half, readings and discussions will interrogate Greek and Roman concepts of territoriality and border-making, frontiers and hinterlands, and political community, as well as assess limitations in method and evidence for studying the material histories of nonurban social formations. The course takes a broad approach by exploring diverse regional and chronological case studies. In the second quarter, students will write a major research paper. Non-Classics students may enroll for just the first quarter by arrangement with the instructors. C. Kearns/C. Ando.  Winter.