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Presentation #2

By Arum Park

I worked for three years at a Mormon-affiliated institution as a Visiting Assistant Professor — a very positive experience for me overall, but definitely one requiring some adjustment. My non-LDS identity and my female gender were salient in every aspect of my work there: the school employs very few non-Mormons, and relatively few female faculty, so for the vast majority of my students I was the only non-Mormon and one of a few women who had ever taught or would ever teach them. I will discuss how this affected my teaching and my overall integration into the institution's community.

Presentation #1

By Julia Hejduk

Being a Catholic at a Baptist institution is not nearly so tricky as speaking to a mixed audience of believers and non-believers at an SCS panel. What I mean by “Christianity” (that every person is a child of God, infinitely loved and created for true freedom and everlasting happiness; Mother Teresa) is not what many hear in “Christianity” (prohibitions and condemnations at war with freedom and happiness; Steve Bannon).

Aristotle from Reykjavík to Bukhara: The First Global Phase of the Classical Tradition

By Erik Hermans

The early Middle Ages is an underappreciated phase in the classical tradition. Overviews of the inheritance of classical thought and literature often jump from antiquity to the rise of universities in the high Middle Ages or to the Renaissance (Ziolkowski, 2010). Nevertheless, the corpus of classical texts that made it to modern times is to a large extent shaped by the choices that early medieval intellectuals made.

Neoplatonism in Colonial Latin America

By Erika Valdivieso

The legacy of Neoplatonism in colonial Spanish America is at least as complex as its development in Europe. In this new context, Neoplatonism became an important mediator between European and American antiquities, invoked as a means to render ancient traditions mutually intelligible. Thus Neoplatonic thought frequently appears when an author describes the customs of indigenous peoples in reference to ancient and Renaissance ideas. Three examples will be discussed which demonstrate the range of application for Neoplatonic thought in the colonial period.

Vergil in the Antipodes: the Classical Tradition and Colonial Australian Literature

By Sarah Midford

When Captain Cook claimed terra Australis for the British Empire in 1770, the continent was understood to be an empty land, devoid of history, culture, and civilization. In place of built environments and written histories, or what was thought of as recognisable cultural and historical heritage, the new settlers emphasized Australia’s great potential: Australia was a sleeping continent brought to life by European settlement (Yarrington, 1879).

The Development of the Classical Tradition in Africa: Theoretical Considerations and Interpretive Consequences

By William Dominik

This presentation examines the development of the classical tradition in Africa and how Classics has been used for various social, cultural and political purposes. The first part of this paper highlights theoretical considerations regarding the classical tradition on the African subcontinent. The classical tradition model tends to emphasize the influence of classical ideas upon later periods of western civilization.

The Classical Tradition and the Translation of Latin Poetry in Twentieth-Century China

By Bobby Xinyue

This paper examines the dissemination, translation, and intellectual impact of Greek and Latin poetry in China in the twentieth century. It uses Ovid as a case study to explore the key factors that have affected the study of Latin poetry in cultures (such as China) which stand outside notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ that connect the West to a Greco-Roman past.

Pilgrimage as Biography in Antiquity: Travel, Process, and Liminality in Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana

By Carson Bay

Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana shares with many ancient biographies the penchant to present its subject as a paragon of virtue. What it does not share with many of these biographies is its method. Philostratus’s Life reads like one long pilgrimage account. This paper applies the most common anthropological framework associated with pilgrimage accounts to this Life as a heuristic for understanding the dynamics of Philostratus’s rhetorical strategy.

Agesilaus, Athens, and Communicating Civic Virtue

By Mitchell Parks

As Tomas Hägg demonstrated with the title of the first chapter of The Art of Biography in Antiquity—“In the beginning was Xenophon”—the study of how ancient authors depicted the lives of individuals must begin with Xenophon’s literary experiments, particularly his works in praise of Socrates and Agesilaus. Within the cultural milieu of democratic Athens, however, Xenophon’s choice to elevate individuals above the collective polis was not an obvious one: one need only think of the epitaphios logos and its role in reinforcing democratic ideology.