2022-23

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.

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.  

The Coptic versions of the Bible present one of the earliest translations of Christian scripture as the new religion spread. Understanding how the Bible (canonical and non-canonical) was read and used in Egypt at this early stage implies studying the development of Christian communities in those agitated times, as well as paying attention to questions of literacy and linguistic environment, book production, Bible (both Greek and Coptic) on papyrus, and translation and interpretation in Antiquity. The course will draw on materials assembled from my work on the critical edition of the Gospel of Mark, but will also look into other materials like the Coptic Old Testament, and non-canonical scriptures such as Nag Hammadi and the Gnostic scriptures. No previous knowledge of Coptic is required. A brief introduction to the Coptic language will be part of the class, and parallel sessions of additional language instruction will be planned for those who are interested in learning more.

What explains the diverse developments of social and economic inequality in the ancient world, and why are historians and archaeologists so interested in this question? In this seminar, we begin by thinking about key terms related to inequality – class, status, and wealth - and how scholars in ancient history and archaeology identify and distinguish evidence for these practices, analyze their data, and produce comparative analyses of past societies, using the Mediterranean as a case study. Readings will introduce important ideas from economic and sociological understandings of how value, and access to things of value and the means of making it, might have constructed and maintained forms of difference, power, and cultural capital. The course will explore evidence of inequality by sampling from a wide range of societies, from the Bronze Age to the Roman Empire, to assess how uneven practices of production, accumulation, and consumption shaped social lives.

Stoicism and Epicureanism became two major strands of philosophy after Aristotle and attracted many followers. They are fundamentally opposed. The Stoics believed in an immanent deity who issued moral laws to humans. They were also the first to develop a robust theory of cosmopolitanism and natural law. The Epicureans rejected divine governance, leaving it up to humans to achieve their own happiness by following the goal of pleasure. Much derided as hedonists, they sought to purify the quest for pleasure by understanding the height of pleasure as the absence of pain. Surprisingly, both groups discovered in time that had something in common. This course will examine their differences and interactions in Greek and Roman antiquity, as well as trace the impact of both philosophies in modern times.  

Islands, and Mediterranean islands in particular, have long provoked curiosity and intrigue, and have persisted as places for thinking about utopia, incongruity, distinctiveness, or backwardness since antiquity. This seminar course interrogates the representations of islands in ancient thought as well as their own archaeological and historical records in order to trace their often elliptical categorization in modern scholarship. Are islands unique because they are isolated, or rather because they become crossroads of special interaction? From the mythical island of the Cyclopes, to the Aegean archipelagos, to the large masses like Sicily or Cyprus, discussions will explore approaches to insularity, isolation, connectivity, and identity using a wide range of textual and material evidence and theoretical insights from geography, anthropology, history, literature, and environmental science.  

 From the strong, rapid fourteeners of Chapman’s Elizabethan English to the taut rhythms of Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Homer’s Iliad takes on new meaning and feel each time the poem is translated anew. This workshop-style course will engage the many English versions of Homeric poetry, attending to theme, image, word, line, paragraph, and meter; noting what is kept and what is changed. We will also consider the theory and practice of translation, especially as it has been understood by these poets over the last four centuries. No knowledge of Greek is required.