While 20th c. proclamations on the death of religion were clearly ill-conceived, the concept of religion has languished in anthropology for some time. This course provides a post-mortem, while also exploring new ways of understanding the influence of mystery and divinity on social life. We begin with classic theories of religion and major critiques before exploring traditions like Orthodox Christianity, Santería/Ocha and Hinduism alongside UFO cultures and immortalist associations. Readings pair ethnography from the Mediterranean to Melanesia with new theoretical approaches, asking students to read religion and non-religion against the grain.

The course explores how art worked in politics and religion from ca. 300-1200 CE in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Students encounter the arts of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Judaism and Islam, great courts and migratory societies; dynamics of word and image, multilingualism, intercultural connection, and local identity. We examine how art can represent and shape notions of sacred and secular power. We consider how the work of 'art' in this period is itself powerful and, sometimes, dangerous. Course format combines lecture on various cultural contexts with workshop discussion focused on specific media and materials, or individual examples.

This seminar will explore ethical issues in the study and practice of archaeology, cultural resource management, museum studies, and bioarchaeology. Students are expected to substantively contribute to class discussions on a weekly basis, as well as to lead the discussion of one set of readings. Weekly seminars will be accompanied by a group midterm debate on an assigned ethical issue and an individual final research project (with a class presentation and 20-minute final conversation with Prof. Kay).

Antioch was unique among the great cities of the classical world for its position at the crossroads between the Mediterranean and Asia. Students in this course will get exclusive access to the archives and artifacts from Princeton's mostly unpublished Antioch excavations of the 1930s. The focus of the 2024 course will be death and its aftermath in the Greek, Roman, and Islamic worlds, based on excavations in an area just outside the ancient walls of Antioch, which revealed burial remains and the famous and unparalleled Mnemoysne mosaic, which depicts a symposium of women participants.

Nature shapes how many of us think about the world. It's a balanced ecological system; the opposite of culture; a way of explaining how living things work; and a way of regulating how living things, especially people, should live. We will look at how ideas about natures, Nature, and "living naturally" take shape in texts from ancient Greece and Rome. We'll consider the Greek and Roman texts in relationship to other ways of imagining human and non-human life and the world in the Mediterranean and other cultures. We'll think, too, about how these ancient ideas bear on how we think about nature today-and how we might think differently.

This course explores the history of engagement by women writers and artists with the place, idea, and myths of Greece. We first read ancient female writers, preeminently Sappho, and examine the representation of women in ancient texts; we then trace the strategies through which "Greece" allows later women writers to assert their authority and authorship, question gender hierarchies and political/sociocultural paradigms, and lay a claim to the classical tradition. We consider how ancient writing affects contemporary understandings of identity and gender, and how modern works, from novels to plays to films, shape our view of the ancient world.

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 philosophy of history belongs to Greek and Roman historians? How did the ancient historians themselves ask this question? Was their theory and practice as marked with change as has been European and American historiography since the 18th century? Finally, why did some contemporary practice turn back to classical narrative historiography? This course will cover major Greek and Roman historians, ancillary classical theory, and some pertinent contemporary philosophers of history.

This discussion-based seminar will examine the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of food and dining in the ancient Roman world. This course will approach food in the Roman world through a variety of sources, literary and archaeological, and will push students to consider what we can learn about Roman society and culture through the lens of food.

The course discusses classical Greek perspectives on the gods and theology, drawing from both "philosophy" and "literature" and exploring their intersections and divergences. Topics include myth and myth-criticism, cosmology and cosmogony, allegoresis and hermeneutics, ritual and divination, and agnosticism and atheism. Major authors include Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Empedocles, Aristophanes, Euripides, the sophists, the Hippocratic authors, Xenophon, and Plato. The course works closely with texts in the original, but is open to students who wish to engage intensively through translation.

A comprehensive introduction to the central topics and methods of Greek history, offering a chronological overview of periods and significant developments; a survey of the current state of the field and of specialized sub-disciplines (e.g., epigraphy and numismatics); and an exploration of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to the study of the past.

This course aims to demystify the methods, instruments, and skills of palaeography and textual criticism, while furnishing participants with hands-on experience of discovering, researching, and editing a previously unpublished Greek text. Students are introduced to relevant aspects of codicology and manuscript study more broadly, as well as scholarship on the potential and the limits of editorial practice in the humanities. Strong classical Greek (e.g., ability to handle Attic prose) a must.

Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.

This course will focus on the history of the later Roman Empire, a period which historians often refer to as "Late Antiquity." We will begin our class in pagan Rome at the start of the third century and end it in Baghdad in the ninth century: in between these two points, the Mediterranean world experienced a series of cultural and political revolutions whose reverberations can still be felt today. We will witness civil wars, barbarian invasions, the triumph of Christianity over paganism, the fall of the Western Empire, the rise of Islam, the Greco-Arabic translation movement and much more.

This class examines the relationship between law and society in the Roman and post-Roman worlds. We begin with the origins of Roman law in the ancient world, and end with the rediscovery of Roman law in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries. Over the course of the intervening millennium, we will focus on pivotal moments and key texts in the development of the legal cultures of the Roman and post-Roman worlds of Western Eurasia. Our goal will be to think about how law and law-like norms both shape and are shaped by society and social practices.

The littoral of the Great Sea has long been viewed as a major place of contact, conflict and exchange for groups belonging to the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This course approaches the encounters of different religions and ethnicities in such a manner as to introduce students not only to the classic historiography on the subject, but also to the main controversies and debates now current in scholarship. Our analysis and evaluation of the connections that developed between individuals and communities will focus on the High Middle Ages.

This course consolidates and expands student knowledge of modern Greek acquired in HLS 101 by continuing to focus on the fundamentals of grammar and syntax with parallel emphasis on reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Through sustained practice and a wide range of materials and activities, students are provided with skills and vocabulary necessary to understand and produce written texts and communicate effectively at an elementary level, while being acquainted with key aspects of modern Greek society and culture.

This course is designed to develop proficiency by focusing on active vocabulary expansion, advanced grammar and syntax, and increased competence in reading, writing, listening comprehension, and oral communication. Students will enhance and refine their language skills, while also gaining a deeper understanding of modern Greek society and culture.

This course compares the canonical cosmogonies of ancient Mesopotamia, Israel and Greece. We will study in detail the creation epic Enuma eliš and the flood epic Atra-hasis from Babylon, the opening chapters of the Biblical book of Genesis, and Hesiod's Theogony and Catalogue of women; as well as considering related texts from across the ancient Mediterranean. We will ask how the set texts describe the earliest history of the world and what this meant for their ancient audiences, how they relate to each other, and how they inform the long history of human investigation into the origins of the universe.

In this course, we investigate questions of material persistence and plasticity through artifacts, embodied practices, and textually embedded ideas of matter and body that emerged in the ancient Mediterranean and carry on today. Moving along three conceptual axes (body, cosmology, change) and working with three primary materials (plaster, rubber, wax), we experiment with practices of close reading; speculative, material-based art-making; different genres of writing; historical analysis; and other strategies of engaging premodern techniques of making alongside ancient philosophies of matter within contemporary materialist projects.

In this course you will learn the history of one of the world's most enduring Empires, the Ottoman Empire, from its beginnings in the fourteenth century to the advent of reform in the early nineteenth century. At its height, the Ottomans ruled over the Middle East, Southeastern Europe and much of the Mediterranean. About twenty five countries today were at one time part of the Empire. In addition, empire has been the world's most common form of political organization for the last 2500 years. In this course you will also learn the essentials of this enduring political arrangement in governing the world.

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.

How did the earliest followers of Jesus understand his life and death? What scriptures did they read and how do those texts relate to the New Testament? Where did they hold their secret meetings? How did women participate in leadership? What did early Christians do when Jesus did not return? Why did Jesus' followers suffer martyrdom? This course is an introduction to the Jesus movement in the context of the Roman world. We examine major themes and debates through an array of relevant sources, such as lost gospels, Dead Sea scrolls, and aspects of material culture.

Ancient Antioch and Dura-Europos (in Syria) were characterized by religious diversity. Stunning mosaics, frescoes, and other archaeological evidence and a rich literary tradition help us to understand life in the cities. In this seminar, we join with students at Yale University to learn about the social and religious history and cultural heritage of these cities. Yale students travel to Princeton, and Princeton students travel to New Haven, to learn about the collections that each of our universities has. We engage in new research into historical reconstructions of Antioch and Dura.

This course explores how the drama of ancient Athens is restaged and rewritten for today's audiences. Students will read plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes to confront the interpretative and performative challenges they offer on the page and on the stage - as well as the opportunities they provide contemporary playwrights to speak to the present moment. Our research will be enhanced by recorded productions preserved online, and if available, by live performances.