Classics
- ART 207/HLS 207/CLA 207/ARC 211: Greek ArchitectureWhat makes a Greek temple ringed with marble columns "classical"? This course offers a historical overview of Greek architecture, case studies of landmark structures, and thematic explorations of how ancient religion, politics, and society shaped the built environment of the Aegean and broader Mediterranean. It also delves into the oldest surviving work of architecture theory and looks critically at the legacies of antiquity, particularly in the making of American self-image(s). Precepts include exercises in observation and experiments with ancient building materials (e.g. carving marble) and technologies.
- ART 316/HLS 316/CLA 213: The Formation of Christian ArtArt in late antiquity has often been characterized as an art in decline, but this judgment is relative, relying on standards formulated for art of other periods. Challenging this assumption, we will examine the distinct and powerful transformations within the visual culture of the period between the third and sixth centuries AD. This period witnesses the mutation of the institutions of the Roman Empire into those of the Christian Byzantine Empire. The fundamental change in religious identity that was the basis for this development directly impacted the art from that era that will be the focus of this course.
- ART 398/CLA 398/NES 398: Ancient Egyptian Funerary CultureTomb monuments built for the highest status members of ancient Egyptian society comprise one of the most important sources of information on ancient Egyptian civilization. In this course, we will examine many aspects of elite funerary culture, centering the built stone tombs filled with images and texts, while incorporating as well other forms of religious texts, stelae, statuary, and coffins. We will consider questions of ancient Egyptian religious beliefs and conceptions of the afterlife, the role of ritual practices, the changing relationship between high elite officials and the king, and multiple aspects of ancient social identities.
- ART 599/CLA 597/PAW 599/HLS 599: The Greek HouseA study of the archaeology of the Greek house (Early Archaic huts through Hellenistic palaces). Emphasis on the close reading of archaeological sites and assemblages and the integration of literary with material evidence. Topics include the discovery of houses, the identification of farms, the integration of the house with urban plans and natural landscapes, the organization and use of space, gender, domestic economies, and religious practice. Attention devoted to social, political, and regional dynamics; to the concept of the "private" in ancient Greece; and to questioning the heuristic value of the term "house."
- CLA 203/COM 217/HLS 201/TRA 203: What is a Classic?"What is a Classic?" asks what goes into the making of a classic text. It focuses on four, monumental poems from the ancient Mediterranean and Near East: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Gilgamesh, which are discussed through comparison across traditions, ranging as far as Chinese poetry. Students will consider possible definitions and constituents of a classic, while also reflecting on the processes of chance, valorization, and exclusion that go into the formation of a canon. Topics will include transmission, commentary, translation, religion, race, colonization, empire, and world literature.
- CLA 212/HUM 212/GSS 212/HLS 212: Classical MythologyAn introduction to the classical myths in their cultural context and in their wider application to human concerns (such as creation, sex and gender, identity, transformation, and death). The course will offer a who's who of the ancient imaginative world, study the main ancient sources of well known stories, and introduce modern approaches to analyzing myths.
- CLA 216/HIS 216: Archaic and Classical GreeceThe social, political, and cultural history of ancient Greece from ca.750 B.C. through the time of the Peloponnesian War (404 B.C.). Special attention is paid to the emergence of the distinctively Greek form of political organization, the city state, and to democracy, imperialism, social practices, and cultural developments. Emphasis is placed on study of the ancient sources, methods of source analysis, and historical reasoning.
- CLA 250/HUM 253: PompeiiThe astonishing preservation of Pompeii has captured popular imagination ever since it was rediscovered beginning in the 1700s. This course will uncover the urban fabric of the city. We will look at its layout, at public and private buildings and their decoration, and at the wider cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Using physical remains alongside texts in translation, we will explore aspects of the lives of the inhabitants, including entertainment, housing, religion, economy, slavery, political organization and expression, roles played by men and women inside and outside the family, and attitudes towards death.
- CLA 326/HIS 326/HUM 324: Topics in Ancient History: Town and CountryBy the first century BCE, the city of Rome had over one million inhabitants, and was the largest and most densely populated city in the Mediterranean, if not the world. In fact, no other city surpassed ancient Rome in population until the 19th century. Yet scholars have estimated that as much as 80% of the population engaged in agriculture. The urban-rural divide was an important concept in antiquity. In this seminar, we will look at a wide range of evidence -- literary, material, visual, etc. -- to examine the cultural concepts associated with 'town' and 'country' for the ancient Romans.
- CLA 329/GSS 331: Sex and Gender in the Ancient WorldThis course explores the ideas of sex, sexuality and gender in ancient Greek and Roman literature to better understand how these worked in the social, cultural and political spheres of antiquity. We will analyze the primary literary and material evidence we have for sexuality and gender in Greece and Rome, and survey the modern scholarly approaches to those same texts. Topics will include: interactions between the sexes (courtship, extramarital desire, sex and marriage); same-sex desire and homosociality; the status of women and men in terms of social function, age and religious activity; and transgressions.
- CLA 340: Junior Seminar: Introduction to ClassicsThis course will introduce concentrators to the study of classical antiquity. Students will become acquainted with different fields of study within the Department, including literature, ancient history, linguistics, and the long reception of antiquity in the middle ages and modernity in order to acquire an understanding of the history of the discipline and its place in the twenty-first century. Sessions will involve guest visits from members of the faculty. Particular attention will be paid to acquiring the skills necessary to pursue independent research for the spring Junior Paper.
- CLA 503: Survey of Selected Latin Literature: Roman Literary HistoryAn introduction to the major genres of Latin Literature and to the main scholarly issues involved in their study. Also offers intensive practice in reading Latin.
- CLA 506/HLS 506/COM 502/GER 507: Greek Tragedy: Oedipus: Tragedy, Philosophy, PsychoanalysisClose reading of Sophocles' Oedipus the King and sections of Oedipus at Colonus in dialogue with the history of thought on Greek tragedy. Authors may include Aristotle, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Arendt, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon, Vernant, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari,Butler, Honig.
- CLA 532/CHV 532/COM 588: Translatio: Translating and Adapting Greek and Roman Classics in Theory and PracticeThis course analyzes translations of Greek and Latin texts through the lens of translation and adaptation studies. Starting with the theory and practice of translating ancient Greek authors in Rome, we proceed to consider modern translations and adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman texts and to theorize the activity of translation as a distinctive way of knowing and receiving literature. Individual seminars focus on the translation of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Catullus, Horace, and Ovid, as well as classical adaptation in contemporary works by Rita Dove, Anne Carson, Ocean Vuong, and Kae Tempest.
- CLA 545: Problems in Roman History: The Dark Side of EmpireThe title of this seminar is inspired by Manuel Fernández-Götz, Dominik Maschek, and Nico Roymans's fresh provocation in the pages of Antiquity. Our seminar takes up and evaluates their summons to engage more critically with the Roman Republic and Empire's "predatory regime," mainly by bringing models of imperial violence and counter-imperial resistance (e.g., Romanization, hybridity, creolization, epistemicide) into closer dialogue with newly published work on law, religion, economy, and the visual and literary arts in the Roman Mediterranean.
- CLA 547/PAW 503/HLS 547/HIS 557/ART 527: Problems in Ancient History: Naturalism and Anti-NaturalismThis seminar attempts to set the rise of naturalistic depictions in the visual arts (especially the individuated portrait) in the context of literary, philosophical, and medical traditions of the time (6th-4th centuries BCE). The focus and character of the discussions is both historical and historiographic.
- CLA 548/HLS 548/PAW 548/ART 532: Problems in Ancient History: Introduction to Ancient and Medieval NumismaticsA seminar covering the basic methodology of numismatics, including die, hoard and archaeological analysis as well as a survey of pre-modern coinages. The Western coinage tradition is covered, from its origins in the Greco-Persian world through classical and Hellenistic Greek coinage, Roman imperial and provincial issues, Parthian and Sasanian issues, the coinage of Byzantium, the Islamic world, and medieval and renaissance Europe. Students research and report on problems involving coinages related to their own areas of specialization. Open to undergraduates by permission of the instructor.
- CLA 565/HLS 565: Problems in Medieval Literature: Classical Reception in the Middle AgesThis course casts a wide net over Medieval literature, Greek and/or Latin, as well as in comparison with other medieval languages and cultures. Its aim is to furnish graduate students in a variety of fields, including Classics, History, Philosophy, Religion, and Art & Architecture, with proficiency in the primary texts of the Middle Ages, as well as the scholarship about medieval literary culture.
- CLA 599: Dissertation Writers' SeminarA 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 becoming a professional scholar and teacher, such as mastering the craft of the journal article (conceiving, writing and submitting), writing effective syllabi for different kinds of courses, and turning the dissertation into a book (with the opportunity to talk to an editor from a university press).
- HIS 344/CLA 344/MED 344: The Civilization of the High Middle AgesIn lectures, to provide my interpretation (and a conspectus of differing interpretations) of the civilization of Western Europe, 11th-14th century; by readings, to introduce students to the variety of surviving sources; through the paper, to give students a taste of doing medieval history.
- HUM 470/MUS 470/CLA 470: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities: Abandoned WomenThis team-taught interdisciplinary seminar will trace the fates of a series of abandoned women in ancient literature, interweaving their story with responses in operatic and musical formats from the modern world. The seminar will investigate why this theme is so prominent in both the ancient and modern traditions, and it will concentrate on how opera transforms the plots and characters of drama and narrative.
- HUM 598/CLA 588/ENG 585: Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts: Thinking in Public, Writing for the WorldThis course examines the ever-evolving role of the university-trained scholar in contemporary culture. In the varied ecosystems of contemporary publishing, what are the boundaries between academic and public-facing work? What obligations, if any, do scholars have to engage with the public? How do institutional structures like discipline and field bear on what we choose to write about in non-academic venues? What does it mean, as a scholar, to be "very online"? Through these questions, and others, we attempt a critical and creative evaluation of the paths for scholarship outside, or alongside, traditional venues for academic writing.
- LIN 210/CLA 210: Introduction to Historical and Comparative LinguisticsThe world's astonishing linguistic diversity owes to the fact that languages change, and that each language takes a unique and unpredictable trajectory of change. In this course, students explore different models of change and the forces behind it. Employing core methodologies (the Comparative Method and Method of Internal Reconstruction), students learn to analyze phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic language changes. We also learn about the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language and the people who spoke it. Strong focus on applying methods to a variety of data sets. See below for prerequisite information.
- POL 301/CLA 301/HLS 303: Political Theory, Athens to AugustineA study of the fundamental questions of political theory as framed in the context of the institutions and writings of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, from the classical period into late antiquity and the spread of Christianity in Rome. We will canvass the meaning of justice in Plato's "Republic", the definition of the citizen in Aristotle's "Politics", Cicero's reflections on the purpose of a commonwealth, and Augustine's challenge to those reflections and to the primacy of political life at all in light of divine purposes. Through these classic texts, we explore basic questions of constitutional ethics and politics.
- POL 553/HLS 552/CLA 553: Political Theory, Athens to Augustine: Graduate SeminarA study of fundamental questions of political theory framed in the context of the institutions and writings of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, from the classical period into late antiquity and the spread of Christianity. Topics include the meaning of justice in Plato's Republic, the definition of the citizen in Aristotle's Politics, Cicero's reflections on the purpose of a commonwealth, and Augustine's challenge to those reflections and to the primacy of political life at all in light of divine purposes. We consider both the primary texts and secondary literature debates to equip students with a working mastery of this tradition.