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The Program Committee has approved a proposal to offer a seminar at the 2015 Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Full details of this session appears below. Seminars are intended to provide an opportunity for extensive discussion of the papers to be presented. To this end attendance at the seminars will be limited, and the speakers in these sessions have been asked to make their papers available by the end of November so that registrants who attend the sessions can read them in advance. Each will present only a brief summary of his or her paper at the session itself.

To ensure the success of this session, the Program Committee requests the following commitments from annual meeting registrants interested in attending a seminar.

1. Ask the Seminar Leaders via e-mail to reserve a place for you at the session. The organizers’ e-mail addresses follow their names in the descriptions below.

2. Read each of the seminar papers in advance of the meeting. Registrants whose requests to participate are accepted will receive copies of the seminar papers.

3. Attend the entire 3-hour session in New Orleans. The Program Committee feels strongly that the success of the seminars will depend in large part on the willingness of all participants to participate actively for the entire session. In addition, persons accepted for attendance at a seminar may be taking the place of another registrant who wished to attend the session. There will be a brief break scheduled about halfway through each session.

Below is the list of speakers and topics for the seminar as well as a brief summary of the session prepared by the organizer:

Friday, January 9, 2015
1:45 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Session #25

Ancient Literacy Reprised (Seminar – Advance Registration Required)
William Johnson (william.johnson@duke.edu), Duke University, and Stephanie Frampton (sframpton@mit.edu), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Organizers
2014 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of William Harris’s Ancient Literacy, a watershed book that helped to set the groundwork for a rising wave of scholarly interest in reading and writing in ancient Greece and Rome. This collection of new work by scholars across the Classics revisits and interrogates some of Harris’s original themes, in conversation with Harris himself. In this encounter we aim collectively to review the state of ancient literacy studies and to model new possibilities for engagement with the evidence and the questions posed by Ancient Literacy across disciplines.

Stephanie Frampton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Introduction (10 mins.)

Gregory Woolf, University of St. Andrews
Ancient Illiteracy (10 mins.)

Raffaella Cribiore, New York University
A Further Look at Literacy and Education in Greek and Roman Egypt (10 mins.)

Sean Gurd, University of Missouri
Incompletion, Revision, and the Ethics of Reading: Cicero on Appropriate Action (10 mins.)

William Harris, Columbia University
Respondent (20 mins.)

General discussion (40 mins.)