The course will focus on the Romans' development of painted decoration for architectural spaces - and how they employed such painted forms to aggrandize those spaces illusionistically, so as to produce a visual world for the imagination.

The conquest of Asia from Anatolia to Afghanistan by Alexander the Great brought far-reaching changes in both the East and the West of the ancient world. Powerful new visual styles and techniques interacted with local ideas and visual cultures in complicated and unpredictable ways. The seminar aims to describe this vital period of ancient visual history and its complex, multi-stranded artistic cultures. It also aims to embody a method of investigating cultural history through material and visual evidence. The classes follow the material on the ground and its archaeological and historical contexts closely.

A seminar on the phenomenon of the Roman villa, its archaeology, history, decoration, and the social practices that arose from this aspect of aristocratic life.

The Greek experience from Alexander the Great through Cleopatra. An exploration of the dramatic expansion of the Greek world into Egypt and the Near East brought about by the conquests and achievements of Alexander. Study of the profound political, social, and intellectual changes that stemmed from the interaction of new cultures, and the entrance of Rome into the Greek world. Readings include history, biography, and inscriptions.

In this course students will engage with modern social science research on cultural globalization as well as with the texts and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, broadly construed (Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Levant, Mesopotamia, etc.). Students will explore how intercultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean set the stage for local globalization processes and served as the origin for modern globalization. Moreover, students will gain the tools to compare and contrast how people in the ancient and modern worlds reacted to intensive globalization and define their identities against it.

What are the features of persuasive political speech? The reliance of democratic politics on memorable oratory stems from traditions dating back to ancient Greece and Rome which were revived in the modern era of parliamentary debates and stump speeches. This course will analyze the rhetorical structure of famous political speeches over time in a bid to better understand the potent mixture of aesthetics and ideology that characterizes political rhetoric, as well as the equally long tradition of regarding political rhetoric as insincere and unscrupulous. Students will try their hand at political speech-writing and oratory in class.

How did visual art and literature inform each other in the ancient world and how does viewing this interaction shape how we produce art today? This course is concerned with the adaptation of classical themes in contemporary culture at the interfaces between different media, including literature, visual art, film, music, and video games. We will begin by examining interactions between different artforms in an ancient context, and how such synaesthetic and intermedial spaces were used to explore how we construct and experience reality.

This course explores reading and writing practices in antiquity and the medieval West, including the cultural history of the book and its functions as both object and text from antiquity to the printing revolution.

Who was Sappho? And what do we make of her today? In this course, students will consider in detail what remains of Sappho's work (including the latest discoveries, published in 2014), and also how her example informs later literatures, arts, identities, and sexualities. Students with no knowledge of ancient Greek and students who already know it well are equally welcome! One session per week will focus on reading and translating original texts with one group, while a parallel session will focus on translations and adaptations through time. One joint session per week will draw perspectives together.

This course offers an introduction to Akkadian, the language of ancient Babylon. The first half of the course introduces students to the basic concepts of Akkadian (old Babylonian) grammar and the cuneiform script. In the second half students consolidate their knowledge of the language by reading selections from classic Babylonian texts, such as the famous law code of King Hammurabi and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Twelve modes of reading' combines, each week, a discussion of relevant theory and a practical application to a text read in the original Greek or Latin. Reading knowledge of these languages is a pre-requisite: it need not be very advanced and will improve through taking this course. Sessions include distinguished visitors associated with specific modes of reading and divide into three thematic groups: Reading through writing: philology, commentary, translation, digitization. Reading suspiciously: Freudian, Marxist, postcolonial feminist readings. Reading through (other) reading: reception, authorship, autobiography, reparation.

A seminar that introduces graduate students to current methods and debates in Roman history and historiography. Provides a chronological overview of the history of Rome and her expanding empire from the early Republic (5th century BC) to Late Antiquity, accompanied by the study of a wide variety of ancient sources, including texts, inscriptions, coins, material culture, art, and archaeology, and the methods commonly used by modern historians to analyze them. Students acquire the basic tools needed to do research in Roman history.

This course studies Lucan's historical epic in its Neronian context and in relation to the preceding literary tradition, not only epic, but also historiographic and declamatory, and considers the poem's influence and reception. We focus on the treatment of civil war, religion and the supernatural, and the relationship between tradition and contemporary relevance.

A collaborative workshop to practice scholarly writing at the dissertation level and beyond, providing guidance on planning and completing the dissertation and on other aspects of professional development.

The 21st century has seen many Greek classics re-told in ways that challenge dominant power structures. We will analyze some of these new versions of old stories while interrogating the very idea of a 'classic'. Why re-tell a story from over 2,000 years ago to begin with? What are the politics of engaging with texts that have been used to underpin ideas of a superior Western civilization? What challenges do writers have to overcome in working with ancient texts? Students will consider these questions as readers but also as writers who will work towards a classics re-write of their own.

The mythological heroines Antigone, Medea and Electra rejected family, society and state. Their resistance was expressed in their refusal to fulfill the traditional roles of daughter, sister, wife, and mother: Antigone loves her dead brother, Medea murders her children, and Electra is inconsolable over the death of her father. These characters go on to have multimedia careers in tragic plays, visual art, opera, films, and even comics. Their images are projected onto ever new screens where our culture works itself out, because their radical female resistance challenges the limits of our understanding even as it provokes and fascinates us.

This course will survey the "Dark Ages" from the end of the Roman Empire to the end of the first millennium (ca. 400-1000 AD), often seen as a time of cultural and political decline, recently even labelled as the "end of civilization". The complex political and social landscape of the Roman Empire, however, had more to offer than just to end. This course will outline how early medieval people(s) in the successor states of the Roman Empire used its resources to form new communities and will suggest to understand the "Dark Ages" as a time of lively social and cultural experimentation, that created the social and political frameworks of Europe.

This course, designed as a seminar, will trace the ways in which humans have dug into the ground in order to find the material remains of the past and then interpreted what they found. We will look at efforts of many kinds: discoveries made by chance as well as those made by deliberate searches; discoveries inspired by dreams and visions as well as those motivated by formal surveys; discoveries of the relics of saints, Christian and other, as well as the remains of ancient civilizations. We will examine our subjects' ideas and their practices, and set both into context.

This course examines ancient texts that have been central to modern conceptions of justice. We will analyze these texts in their own context, understanding both their own arguments and those that they criticize; look at how they have functioned to support different positions in the more recent past; and interrogate whether they should continue to have a role in shaping our notions of justice, and if so, what role that should be. The seminar will include discussions with justice-impacted individuals, as well as the potential for interested students to carry out a community-based project.

We shall study Aristotle's contributions in logic, natural philosophy, metaphysics, and ethics, with emphasis on the ongoing philosophical interest of some of his central insights. We shall compare some of Aristotle's views with those of some of his successors, Hellenistic and beyond.

This course explores how political theorizing by Greek authors (classical and post-classical) drew on the figure of the lawgiver to animate questions about law and founding. It considers Plato and Aristotle on lawgivers against the backdrop of Herodotus and Greek oratory; moves on to later Greek biographers and historians such as Plutarch, and to the post-classical portraits of Moses as framed in Greek texts by Philo and Josephus; and asks how these approaches came to shape later interventions in the history of political thought. Students may write on reception of the figures studied as well as on the Greek sources themselves.

Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What do we know and how do we know it? This course takes up these questions and surveys the diverse history of interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus and how this history shaped and continues to shape contemporary views of and debates about politics, race and ethnicity, sexuality and gender, and civil rights. Throughout the course, we will consider both historical material such as early gospels, letters, and Jewish and Roman sources as well as modern contexts of interpretation in theology, film, art, and music. This course is designed and open to all regardless of (or no) religious background.