Winter

This course traces the emergence of geographic thought in the Mediterranean world and the diachronic representations of space and place that became the foundations for the humanistic and social science of geography. Discussions will examine the practices that led to diverse modes and styles of spatial expression, travel and mapping, the tensions between the known world and the exotic imagined other, and the political, social, and cultural dimensions of geographic works and their historic contexts. Beyond our sustained focus on Strabo, writing under the Roman Empire, we will explore and interrogate both earlier and later traditions, from Hecataeus and Herodotus to Dionysius and Pausanias.

This course will explore how the poets and philosophers of archaic and classical Greece conceptualized “being alone,” particularly insofar as solitude occasioned both unparalleled achievements and unique dangers (both for the individual and the community.) We will read portions of Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, together with excerpts of ancient philosophy, with an aim of thinking through the relationship between individual and community, which is fraught with tension in so many time periods and cultures. We will also reconsider our understanding of the ancient Greeks as primarily “public” in their motivations and values, in light of the array of possibilities offered by solitude in many of these texts. 

In recent decades, scholars of biblical and early Christian literature have examined the various ways literary sources constructed the relationship between “Jews” and “Christians” in Late Antiquity. These resources prove challenging for reconstructing the situation on the ground. This course will introduce students to the various models that scholars have advanced for making sense of the evidence and debated categories such as “Jewish-Christianity.” Against this backdrop, students will undertake a close reading of a select, representative examples to examine the development of adversus Iudaeos (“against the Jews”) literature. The readings will focus our attention on evidence from Greek- and Syriac-speaking Christians living within the multilingual and religiously diverse regions at the boundary of the Roman and Sassanian Persian Empires. Familiar sources such as the Pauline epistles, Apostolic Fathers, and John Chysostom will be accompanied by readings from the pseudo-Clementine literature, the Didascalia Apostolorum, poetry, and Persian Martyr Acts. We will explore how new discoveries within Syriac studies are currently reshaping our approaches to traditional questions. 

This course examines how the human body was represented and conceptualized in ancient Greek art and literature. Moving through three themed units ­– Objects and Bodies, Gender and Sexuality through the Senses, and Fragile Bodies – we will consider how concepts of embodiment were constructed and articulated in a range of social and spatial contexts, including sanctuaries, drinking parties, grave sites, and battlefields. A central goal of this course is to bring together two types of evidence – material objects and written sources – from classical antiquity that are traditionally studied apart. Through primary texts (in translation), discussions of objects, and museum visits, we will develop strategies for thinking across methodological divides and between word and image to arrive at a richer, more textured understanding of the body in ancient Greece. 

This course will cover the long life of ancient Greek poetry, touching on many genres in their first forms: epic and hymns, didactic, theogonic, iambic, elegiac, lyric, epinician, tragic, comedic, pastoral, dithyrambic poetry, and poems that are practically unclassifiable. We will seek to discuss key moments, passages, and poems that give entry to larger literary questions and themes. We will pay particular attention to details of genre, dialect, and meter, while also being attentive to the history of scholarship that attends on these traditions. We will read some secondary literature and a lot of Greek. 

This course will examine instances of Greek lyric genres throughout the archaic and classical periods, focusing on the structure, themes and sounds of the poetry and investigating their performative and historical contexts. Readings will include Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Ibycus, Alcaeus, Simonides, Bacchylides, Pindar and Timotheus. In Greek.

Primary readings are drawn from the Tiberian books of the Annals, in which Tacitus describes the consolidation of the imperial regime after the death of Augustus. Parallel accounts and secondary readings are used to help bring out the methods of selecting and ordering data and the stylistic effects that typify a Tacitean narrative.

What happens when we consider the cultures, histories, and politics of the ancient Greek world from outside its Aegean ecumene? From Homeric ethnographies to Hellenistic expansion, the borders and peripheries of Greek life became rich spaces for both imagining and constructing Greek identity and civilization through interactions with myriad “others”: barbarians, allies, kings, and monsters. And in recent decades, interdisciplinary research has examined what life was like on these peripheries, at the intersections of Greek colonization, trade, religion, and the state. In this course we examine the concept of peripheries (and cores) and question the methodologies that historians and archaeologists use to consider the dynamic spaces around the edges of the Aegean sea: colonial settlements, sites of pilgrimage, industrial districts, and exotic fringes, among others. Using textual and material evidence, and taking a broad approach by exploring case studies from Iberia to India, we consider the practices through which diverse peripheries became intertwined with Greek culture (or not), and how current postcolonial approaches are decentering the study of ancient Greek culture.

This course traces the emergence of geographic thought in the Mediterranean world and the diachronic representations of space and place that became the foundations for the humanistic and social science of geography. Discussions will examine the practices that led to diverse modes and styles of spatial expression, travel and mapping, the tensions between the known world and the exotic imagined other, and the political, social, and cultural dimensions of geographic works and their historic contexts. Beyond our sustained focus on Strabo, writing under the Roman Empire, we will explore and interrogate both earlier and later traditions, from Hecataeus and Herodotus to Dionysius and Pausanias.

This course will explore how the poets and philosophers of archaic and classical Greece conceptualized “being alone,” particularly insofar as solitude occasioned both unparalleled achievements and unique dangers (both for the individual and the community). We will read portions of Homer’s Iliad, Hesiod’s Theogony, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, together with excerpts of ancient philosophy, with an aim of thinking through the relationship between individual and community, which is fraught with tension in so many time periods and cultures. We will also reconsider our understanding of the ancient Greeks as primarily “public” in their motivations and values, in light of the array of possibilities offered by solitude in many of these texts.