Winter

This course is intended for students with some experience in Latin to quickly review what they know and upgrade their skills in reading and understanding Latin. In this course, students will expand their vocabulary, learn more advanced grammar, and practice extensive reading.

This course continues the study of basic Latin. Course work involves reading Latin, translating from Latin into English and vice versa, and study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Latin text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

Readings concentrate on Cicero's Catalinarian Orations, the famous group of speeches he delivered in 63 BC against L. Sergius Catilina, who was plotting to overthrow the Roman government. Some discussion of the history and culture of the period; study of problems of grammar as necessary.

This course is intended for students with some experience in Latin to quickly review what they know and upgrade their skills in reading and understanding Latin. In this course, students will expand their vocabulary, learn more advanced grammar, and practice extensive reading. Terms Offered: Summer, Winter

This course continues the study of basic Latin. Course work involves reading Latin, translating from Latin into English and vice versa, and study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Latin text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

This course includes analysis and translation of the Greek text, discussion of Sophoclean language and dramatic technique, and relevant trends in fifth-century Athenian intellectual history.

This course continues the study of basic Ancient Greek. Course work involves reading practice, presentational writing, and formal study of grammar and vocabulary. Throughout the course, students will encounter authentic Ancient Greek text. Students who complete this course will be able to understand complex sentences, and often to combine them into larger units of meaning.

In this course we will read as much as possible of Vergil’s Aeneid in the original, and the rest in translation. Our focus will be on the way the poem interrogates some of its most basic claims about empire, piety, heroism, and history, but we will try to avoid falling into the binary trap of “positive” and “negative” readings of the epic’s relationship to its Roman imperial context.  Requirements: Class presentation; 10 page paper; final.

This seminar questions the prerogatives of disciplines in framing and explaining social change via mobility. Following earlier theories of diffusion to understand diachronic cultural change, and the subsequent contextual critiques that privilege historical contingencies and human agency, advances in identifying past human movement through techniques like ancient DNA genome testing have increasingly led to the revival of migration as a subject of focus and explanation. As growing interest in contemporary refugee and forced migration studies is showing, migration represents not just a wide-ranging practice of different types, but is a semantically charged and ambiguous term whose recent applications provide new opportunities to assess its interpretive advantages and limitations. Is the new empirical emphasis on migration re-racializing antiquity? What do we gain by studying concepts of diasporas, transnationalism, and border crossings in the premodern world? Why does migration matter? Divided into two parts, the course covers the conceptual and theoretical work in current literature on migration as well as applications to specific historical problems from ancient and modern Eurasia. (Meeting Fridays from 1:30-4:20pm in JRL TBA Enrollment Limit: 18)

A close literary and philological analysis of one of the most remarkable and perplexing of all Greek tragedies. While this has traditionally been one of the most neglected of Sophocles’ tragedies, it is a drama of extraordinary force and beauty and the issues that it explores – husband and wife, parents and child, sexual violence, myth and temporality, divinity and humanity, suffering and transcendence – are ones that are both of permanent interest and of particular relevance to our present concerns. The poetic text, in its many dimensions, will offer more than adequate material for classroom analysis and discussion, but some attention will also be directed to the reception of this play.