An affiliated group is a group having an organizational structure independent of the SCS. The affiliated group has a common purpose and/or scholarly interest, usually representing a special field or ancillary discipline. Affiliated groups maintain membership lists, and the majority charge dues and circulate newsletters. Affiliated groups are chartered for five-year periods for participation in the SCS/AIA Joint Annual Meeting. Each Category II Affiliated Group is authorized to issue a Call for Papers and to take responsibility for the selection of abstracts and discussants. Abstracts for affiliated group panels are submitted directly to the designated organizers. Members wishing to present a paper in a panel organized by an affiliated group must have paid SCS membership dues for 2013. A presenter who is responding to a call for abstracts from an affiliated group is not eligible for a waiver of the membership requirement. If a member’s paper is accepted for an Affiliated Group Panel, that member may not submit another abstract for consideration by the Program Committee for a regular paper session.
Panel organizers have the right to cancel their panels if the abstract submissions received are, in their judgment, insufficient in number, quality, or relevance to constitute a valid panel. Please note: The panel must be canceled if the organizers receive fewer than 4 abstracts for consideration or accept fewer than 3. Only papers submitted anonymously by the announced deadline and accepted through a process of anonymous review may be presented. Although the organizers may appoint presiders and discussants/respondents for their sessions, invited talks are not permitted. Reviewers and organizers may not present papers although they may serve as discussants/respondents. Each reviewer appointed by the organizer(s) must review every abstract submitted for the session.
American Association for Neo-Latin Studies
American Classical League
American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy
American Society of Papyrologists
Digital Classics Association
Eta Sigma Phi
Friends of Numismatics
International Plutarch Society
International Society for Neoplatonic Studies
Lambda Classical Caucus
Medieval Latin Studies Group
Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy
Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacy
Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Society for Late Antiquity
Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature
Society for the Study of Greek and Latin Languages and Linguistics
Vergilian Society
Women's Classical Caucus
The World of Neo-Latin: Current Research
Organized by Anne-Marie Lewis, York University
Sponsored by the American Association for Neo-Latin Studies (AANLS)
The AANLS invites proposals for a panel of papers on current research dealing with the world of Neo-Latin to be held at the meeting of the Society of Classical Studies (SCS) in Chicago in January, 2014. Our intent is to illustrate the diversity and richness of Neo-Latin Studies and to underscore the importance of research concerning the complex international phenomenon of Neo-Latin literature.
We welcome papers on all aspects of the study of literary, historical, technical and scholarly works written in Latin in the Renaissance and early Modern Period (to about 1800); we will also consider proposals dealing with more recent Neo-Latin.
Abstracts should be sent not later than March 1, 2013 (note revised deadline) to Anne-Marie Lewis, preferably electronically to mailto:amlewis@yorku.ca, or by mail to Prof. Anne-Marie Lewis, Department of Languages, Literatures & Linguistics, S561 Ross Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON L4S 1R3 Canada. Abstracts should be only one page in length.
In accordance with SCS regulations, all abstracts for papers will be read anonymously by three referees. Please follow the instructions for the format of individual abstracts that appear on the APA web site. In your cover letter or e-mail, please confirm that you are an APA or AIA member in good standing, with dues paid through 2013.
Women of the Roman Empire
Organized by Jacqueline Carlon, University of Massachusetts Boston and Mary C. English, Montclair State University
Sponsored by the American Classical League
The American Classical League invites scholars and teachers of Roman history and culture to submit abstracts for its panel session at the Chicago, IL Meeting of the American Philological Association in January, 2014. We are particularly interested in papers that address such topics as women in imperial literature, women in the Roman provinces, women as patrons, and women and Roman entertainment.
Abstracts should be submitted to Mary C. English, Dept. of Classics, Montclair State University, Montclair NJ 07043 (englishm@mail.montclair.edu). They should be only one page in length and conform to the instructions for the format of individual abstracts that appear in the APA Program Guide. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is March 1, 2013.
“Graffiti and their supports: informal texts in context”
Organized by John Bodel, Brown University
Sponsored by the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy
The American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy invites submissions for a panel at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Philological Association, January 2-5, 2014, in Chicago, on the topic “Graffiti and their supports: informal texts in context”
Graffiti, even more than other inscriptions, are tied to their physical settings—the objects on which they are written, the places where they are displayed, or the spatial relationship they bear to other writings or drawings on the same surfaces. As the recent collection of essays edited by J. A. Baird and C. Taylor, Ancient Graffiti in Context (2011), well demonstrates, not only wall inscriptions from Pompeii but also graffiti and dipinti of various types in myriad contexts from across the ancient Mediterranean world provide evidence of writing practices and written cultures understudied and poorly documented that have seldom been investigated comparatively and for which even local contextualization has in many cases scarcely begun. The sociology of graffiti production and consumption and the cultural history of informal public writing have been productively explored in research on modern graffiti (e.g. N. Macdonald, The Graffiti Subculture, 2002; J. Austin, Taking the Train, 2001; J. Oliver and T. Neal, Wild Signs, 2010), but few inroads have been made into these areas in study of the ancient world.
The aim of this panel is to advance this line of inquiry by soliciting papers that consider ancient Greek and Latin graffiti and other forms of informal writing in context, broadly conceived to include not only physical but also scriptural or visual context. Studies that approach the subject comparatively or theoretically or that examine graffiti as manifestations of particular writing practices are especially welcome. Topics of investigation might include, but are not limited to: the interaction of text and image; “dialogic” graffiti; self-referential graffiti or those that refer to their supports; literacy and popular culture; temporality (ephemerality or permanence); and readership and reception.
Abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by the ASGLE Executive Committee and should not be longer than 500 words (bibliography excluded). Please follow the APA Instructions for Abstract Authors and include the ASGLE Abstract Submission Form with your abstract. Note also the APA Program Committee’s Suggestions for Abstracts. The abstract should be sent electronically as a MS Word document and the Abstract Submission Form as a PDF by February 1, 2013, to: John Bodel, Vice-President, ASGLE at mailto:john_bodel@brown.edu. All Greek should either be transliterated or employ a Unicode font. Authors submitting abstracts must be APA members in good standing.
Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt
Organized by Todd Hickey, The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri
Sponsored by the American Society of Papyrologists
The American Society of Papyrologists invites proposals for papers for its panel "Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt" at the 2014 meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago, Illinois (2-5 January). Although the scope of papyrological studies is wide, submissions for this panel must meet at least one of the following criteria:
(a) they must deploy evidence for ancient cultures and literatures that is preserved on papyri, ostraka, or wooden tablets (in Greek, Latin, Coptic, demotic Egyptian, Arabic, or other pertinent languages);
(b) they must investigate aspects of the histories or cultures of Egypt from the Hellenistic to the early Islamic period.
Submissions from graduate students and faculty at all levels are welcome. Prospective speakers must be members in good standing of the APA.
Please send abstracts to Todd Hickey, tmhickey@berkeley.edu, by 8 March 2013 (note revised deadline). Abstracts should not exceed 600 words and should not include the author's name to ensure anonymous review.
If sent by regular mail, abstracts should be postmarked by 8 March 2013 and addressed to T.M. Hickey, The Center for the Tebtunis Papyri, The Bancroft Library MC-6000, Berkeley, California 94720.
Getting Started with Digital Classics
Organizers: Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo, SUNY; Gregory Crane, Tufts University; Christopher Blackwell, Furman University; Allen Romano, Florida State University; Charlotte Roueché, Kings College London
Sponsored by the Digital Classics Association
The topics for the 2014-2018 panels of the Digital Classics Association (DCA) are arranged in a sequence designed to introduce APA / AIA members not familiar with the current state of digital approaches to these methods, and help promote a discourse that will mature over the DCA charter period. Topics beyond 2014 are tentative and subject to change depending upon the progress of discussions at APA and elsewhere.
2014 Call for Papers: Digital approaches to the study of antiquity, emerging as part of a broader discourse of digital humanities, are opening up new perspectives on the classical world. At the same time, they challenge scholars across sub-disciplines to examine how digital resources might affect their methodological assumptions and interpretations. A subsequent DCA session at the APA / AIA meetings will address these concerns directly. The goal of this first workshop is to begin a discussion of digital classics by highlighting some novel research methods relevant to the broad membership of the APA / AIA. The organizers invite abstracts for workshop sessions that will acquaint participants with recently developed digital tools and resources applicable to the study of classical antiquity via demonstration and discussion. Of particular interest are: 1) introductions to a tool or resource by an experienced developer and/or user who can demonstrate its broad and meaningful use, with a discussion of how it bears on research questions, and 2) synthetic and analytical overviews of the digital classics landscape. Priority will be given to discussions of tools and resources that are free and open source. The organizers encourage submissions pertinent to any sub-field of the APA and AIA, including material, textual, and visual cultures. Possible workshop topics include, but are not limited to: architectural and spatial reconstruction, corpus linguistics, creation and curation of literary and epigraphical corpora, literary text mining, and tools for art historical analysis.
Anonymous abstracts of no more than 400 words should be sent to digitalclassicsassociation@gmail.com, with identifying information in the email. Abstracts will be refereed anonymously by three readers in accordance with APA regulations. In your email, please confirm that you are an APA member in good standing. Abstracts should follow the formatting guidelines of the instructions for individual abstracts on the APA website. The deadline for the submission of abstracts is March 29, 2013 (note revised deadline).
Future Sessions: 2015: Making Meaning from Data
Digital techniques hold out the promise of providing a consistent and comprehensive basis for the interpretation of classical culture, yet they also raise significant questions of method. Do digital approaches lead us away from certain kinds of interpretation and toward others? How does the quantitative and aggregate nature of argumentation common to digital humanities relate to other modes of understanding the ancient world? This session will invite papers that reflect theoretically on the study and understanding of classical antiquity in light of the growing importance of digital methods.
Possible Topics for 2016-2017: Digital Resources for Teaching and Outreach; Digital Classics and the Changing Profession
The Next Generation: Papers by Undergraduate Classics Students
Organized by David H. Sick, Rhodes College
Sponsored by Eta Sigma Phi
Eta Sigma Phi, founded in 1914 at the University of Chicago, is a national classics honorary society for students of Latin and/or Greek who attend accredited liberal arts colleges and universities in the United States.
The society is sponsoring this panel in order to showcase the scholarship of undergraduate classics students. Papers may deal with any aspect of the ancient Greek and Roman world (e.g., language, literature, art, history, religion, philosophy) or with the reception of classical culture in modern times. An established scholar will be invited to serve as respondent to the student papers.
Eta Sigma Phi hopes that this panel will serve as a bridge between undergraduate students and the American Philological Association, not just by giving the students an opportunity to experience an APA meeting and to share their views with professional classicists, but also by introducing those professionals to some of the most talented and promising students from the next generation of classicists.
Any student enrolled full-time in an undergraduate program at a college or university during the academic year 2012-2013 is eligible to submit a paper. Anyone interested in proposing a paper for the panel should e-mail the entire paper as a .pdf attachment to mailto:sick@rhodes.edu. The paper must be able to be read aloud at a moderate pace in 15 minutes (or 20 minutes if audio-visual equipment is used), so it should be no longer than 10 double-spaced pages, excluding any endnotes and bibliography. Please also e-mail a one-page abstract of the paper, and a cover page listing name, school, school address, telephone, e-mail address, and audio-visual needs. To preserve anonymity in the evaluation process, the author’s name and school affiliation should appear only on the cover page, not on the abstract or the paper itself. The receipt deadline for the paper, abstract, and cover page is February 1, 2013.
Each submission will be evaluated anonymously by three referees. Students who submit papers for the panel must be current members of the APA. Please direct questions to the Executive Secretary of Eta Sigma Phi, David H. Sick, Department of Greek and Roman Studies, Rhodes College, Memphis, TN 38112 (mailto:sick@rhodes.edu
Class Struggles, Wars and Alliances on Ancient Coins
Sponsored by the Friends of Numismatics.
Organized by Douglas Domingo-Forasté, Department of Classics, California State University Long Beach.
The Friends of Numismatics invites submissions for the 2014 American Philological Association/Archaeological Institute of America Annual meeting, January 2-5, 2014, in Chicago on the topic of Class struggles, Wars and Alliances on Ancient Coins.
Papers may address Greek and Roman coins as evidence of civic or factional ideologies of conflict and alliance, personal, political and military, through the medium of coinage types, symbols and legends. Topics would include numismatic evidence for wars, campaigns, leagues, military and political alliances, factional propaganda of support and opposition, dependent and independent status.
Please send an abstract of no more than 650 words in electronic format to the email below. See APA Instructions for Abstract Authors: Also see Program Committee Suggestions for Abstracts: Send abstracts in electronic format to douglas.foraste@csulb.edu by March 8, 2013 (note revised deadline). Papers will be evaluated anonymously by at least two reviewers. All persons who submit abstracts must be APA members in good standing.
Representation and Self-Representation in Imperial Greek and Latin Dialogues
Organized by Jeffrey Beneker, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Noreen Humble, University of Calgary.
Sponsored by the International Plutarch Society.
The dialogic form originated by Plato and other Socratic philosophers has long been the subject of scholarly study and debate. Questions have been posed about the intersection of the dialogues’ literary form and their philosophical content, why the dialogue became the Socratics’ preferred genre, and the realism of the dialogues’ characters and settings. The genre, however, has a long tradition that crosses into Latin and extends well into the Imperial Era. Dialogues from the later part of the tradition have raised interesting questions of their own, and several recent studies have focused on developments in the genre that manifest themselves during the Imperial Era. These include broad studies, such as Goldhill (ed.), The End of Dialogue in Antiquity (2008), which takes a comparative look at the dialogue across Greek, Roman, Christian and Jewish cultures, and more narrow studies devoted to individual works, such as Klotz & Oikonomopoulou (eds.), The Philosopher’s Banquet (2011), a collection of essays on Plutarch’s Table Talk. Books such as these have helped to illuminate the great variety in the form, content, setting, and purpose of the Imperial dialogues. In this panel we aim to continue this investigation particularly in regard to the representation of individuals and the intersection of reality and fiction when it comes to the “guest lists” of literary dialogues.
The International Plutarch Society invites abstracts for papers that explore the representation of self and of others in Greek and Roman dialogues from the Imperial Era. Some preference may be given to papers that shed light on Plutarch’s aims and methods, but our primary goal is to assemble a collection of papers that explore various aspects of representation in the dialogues of this period.
Questions addressed by the panel might include the following: How realistic are the portraits of the known characters who participate in these dialogic compositions (e.g. Plutarch’s brother Timon in the Table Talk)? Are they meant to be realistic or are they simply vessels for the discussion at hand? If they are meant to be readily identifiable, how much of what is unstated about their character is meant to be understood as augmenting their presentation? To what extent are supposed historical figures, particularly philosophers, vehicles for an author’s own agenda (e.g. Plotinus in St Augustine’s Against the Academicians)? How far are we to separate author from character when an author appears as a character in his own dialogue? And how much does an ancient understanding of the role of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues or of Cicero in his own dialogues affect the presentation of interlocutors in the later tradition?
Abstracts should be sent electronically, in MS Word format or PDF, to Jeffrey Beneker (mailto:jbeneker@wisc.edu). In preparing the abstract, please follow the formatting guidelines for individual abstracts that appear in the APA Program Guide, and plan for a paper that takes no more than 20 minutes to deliver. Abstracts will be judged anonymously. Membership in the International Plutarch Society is not required for participation in this panel. The deadline is February 1, 2013.
What is Neoplatonism? Purpose and Structure of a Philosophical Movement to New Directions in Neoplatonism
Organizer: John F. Finamore (University of Iowa)
Sponsored by the International Society of Neoplatonic Studies
The fates of Neoplatonism have changed in the past two decades. The latest publications in the field show that Neoplatonism has come out from the cupboard of intellectual oddities to become the fastest growing field of research in ancient philosophy. Contemporary research seeks to unravel the psychological, ethical, political, and even scientific consequences of metaphysics. While research in metaphysical themes remains the backbone of the attempts to understand Neoplatonism, most recent research documents the growing interest in examining the question of how the Neoplatonists understood the so-called sensible realm. Areas such as politics, philosophy of nature, and empirical science that before were considered not in the realm of interest of these thinkers, are now understood as part of the essential core of Neoplatonic thought. The emerging picture is thus more balanced, as well as more relevant for human concerns. This panel welcomes papers examining these new directions in Neoplatonic scholarship.
Abstracts of 500-800 words, double-spaced, for papers requiring 15-20 minutes of presentation time should be sent electronically to John Finamore at mailto:john-finamore@uiowa.edu. The member's name should appear only on the cover letter, not on the abstract. All abstracts must be received no later than February 1, 2013. Abstracts will be judged anonymously. The panel organizer will subsequently contact those who have written abstracts with the reviewers’ comments and recommendation.
Stifling Sexuality?
Organizers: Bruce W Frier, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Mark Masterson, Victoria University, Wellington
Sponsored by the Lambda Classical Caucus
Although, at least before the later Empire, sexual behavior between individuals of the same biological sex is widely tolerated in Greek and Roman law, expressions of personal or social disapproval are by no means unusual. Setting to one side the often uncertain status of pederasty, we note that many authors react to same-sex sexual conduct with distaste or even disgust, and subliterate attitudes, emerging in papyri or Pompeian graffiti, exhibit similar levels of hostility. A representative example, perhaps, of unofficial attitudes is Clement of Alexandria, who writes in his Paedagogus at 3.3.23: “I admire the ancient legislators of the Romans: they detested effeminate conduct and, according to their law of justice, they deemed it worthy of the pit to engage in carnal intercourse as the female, against the law of nature.” Clement states that these laws were no longer enforced in Alexandria ca. 200 CE.
How should we evaluate expressions of disdain like Clement’s? How effective are they likely to have been, either in conjunction with legal restrictions or independent of them? It is clear, for instance, that social controls are often adopted or relied upon when law is deemed ineffective for one reason or another. An example is ancient attitudes towards rights of authorship, which were fairly vigilant even though copyright itself did not yet exist; outright plagiarism was not remotely so common as one might have anticipated, see Katharina Schickert, Der Schutz literarischer Urheberschaft im Rom der klassischen Antike(2005).
Should we posit something similar for same-sex behavior? How did social views interact with legal restrictions? Were social controls successful in deterring at least public displays of same-sex conduct? Did social controls modulate displays in certain respects, or lead to the expression of same-sex desire in oblique ways?
Papers are invited on the widest possible basis consistent with this general theme. They may examine norms (alone or in conjunction with law), or look more closely at particular authors or particular forms of sexual conduct, including not just sexual intercourse but also behavior or dress identified with sexual minorities. We also welcome papers that consider connections between these norms and expectations of gender performance conforming to roles for women or men. The general aim of the panel will be to focus closely on this topic of informal modes of control and resultant expression, and so to encourage the development of scholarship concerning them.
Submissions should be anonymous, and otherwise adhere to APA guidelines for the formatting of abstracts. Please do not send abstracts to panel organizers; e-mail them as word documents by February 8, 2013 to Ruby Blondell (Blondell@uw.edu). Questions may be addressed to the panel organizers: bwfrier@umich.eduor mailto:Mark.Masterson@vuw.ac.nz.
The Rhetoric of the Page in Latin Manuscripts
Organized by Bret Mulligan (Haverford College)
Sponsored by the Medieval Latin Studies Group
The Medieval Latin Studies Group invites proposals for papers on the rhetoric of the page in Latin manuscripts of the Middle Ages for a panel to be held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago in January 2014.
Medievalists have long known that the book as an object is an important witness to the society and culture for which it is made, a truth arrived at relatively recently by scholars of print books, such as Chartier and Genette. This panel will look at the manuscript page and how scribes, through the conscious or unconscious choices that they made about layout, script, decoration, and so forth, sought to shape the approach of readers to the text they were about to read. Scribes present different genres quite differently: a thirteenth-century copy of a scholastic summa and a copy of an epic from the same period look quite different, and this differing treatment demands a differing responses from the readers of each, even before they begin to read. Changes over time are equally telling: a fifth-century Vergil looks very different than a humanist Vergil. Those differences reflect very different understandings of and uses for his works in those periods. Welcome submissions would include close analyses close analyses of manuscripts of classical and/or medieval texts, as well as discussions of methodologies relevant for this area of inquiry.
One-page abstracts of papers requiring no more than 20 minutes to deliver should be submitted by February 1, 2013, preferably via email attachment to mailto:bmulliga@haverford.eduor via surface mail to Bret Mulligan, Hall Building, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041. Questions may be directed to Maura Lafferty (Department of Classics, University of Tennessee) at mailto:mlaffert@utk.edu. Membership in the Medieval Latin Studies Group is not required to submit an abstract.
Ancient Greek Philosophy
Anthony Preus, Organizer
Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy
The deadline for submission of papers for the SAGP meetings with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and with the American Philological Association is February 1, 2013.
Papers are normally submitted electronically. Submitters should include their name, the title of the paper, and the meeting at which they would like to present the paper in the message area of the email. The abstract/paper should be prepared for blind review and sent as attachment. We prefer attachments in Word (.doc) or Rich Text Format (.RTF), not PDF. If you have some other program you would like to use, please contact apreus@binghamton.edu first. Electronic transmission tends to garble Greek (because our reviewers don’t necessarily have the same fonts or programs as the submitters), so please transliterate everything.
Both APAs invite 500-800 word abstracts; while we will consider abstracts, the Program Committee prefers submissions that are more informative than that. The Program Committee has requested that submissions be limited to 3000 words MAX, and suggests that submissions less than 1000 words are too short to be evaluated effectively. Accepted papers may be revised up to a max of 5000 words for distribution. Submit to apreus@binghamton.edu.
The members of the Program Committee are: the President (Richard McKirahan) and Secretary (A. Preus), ex officio; Deborah Modrak, Elizabeth Asmis, Fred Miller, Mark Wheeler, and Thomas M. Robinson. They (minus Preus) read the papers without the names of the submitters, and vote their preferences. The top choices are invited to present.
Aisthesis: Sense and Sensation in Greco-Roman Medicine
Organized by Ralph M. Rosen (University of Pennsylvania)
Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Medicine and Pharmacy
Scholars have begun to explore the complexities of the senses in ancient cultures with renewed interest and from a variety of perspectives. Perception and feeling are always deeply implicated in the emotional and psychological lives of humans, and Greco-Roman antiquity offered its own conceptual and discursive variations on such affective realms. Less frequently emphasized is the fact that the mechanisms of perception are physiological, of necessity involving at some point the interaction of bodily organs with the mind. From a strictly medical point of view, the organs of perception presented a peculiar challenge—on the one hand, they were subject to varying states of health and disease just like any other part of the body; on the other, they served as pathways to the non-material world of cognition, consciousness and emotion. We invite papers for this session specifically on Greco-Roman medical and physiological approaches to the bodily senses. All approaches within this general framework are welcome: (e.g.) psychological, philosophical, scientific, diachronic, philological, religious, therapeutics, ethical.
Please send an abstract of 500-600 words of your proposed paper (20 mins.) by e-mail to Ralph M. Rosen (rrosen@sas.upenn.edu). Deadline for submission of abstracts is March 1, 2013 (note revised deadline).
The Politics and Performance of “Dwelling with the Gods”
Organized by Eric Orlin (University of Puget Sound)
Sponsored by the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions
Many studies of ancient religion have recently turned to household and private cult in order to redress a longstanding preference for the study of state-level religiosity. At the same time, these studies make clear that neither household nor state cult can be adequately understood without reference to the other. This panel explores one facet of this relationship, asking how the boundaries between private or household religion and ethnic or state cult might have been manipulated for various reasons in the ancient Mediterranean world, including the Near East and Egypt in addition to Greece and Rome. We invite papers that draw upon events, texts, and/or material evidence to discuss how the concept of “dwelling with the gods” was employed in the ancient world, whether as a norm or a form of transgression. Specific instantiations might include household shrines for family and community deities; houses attached to sanctuaries; parts of houses consecrated as state shrines; images of private individuals set up in sanctuaries of the gods; or even individuals allowed to take up residence in a god’s temple. Panelists might focus upon these or similar practices that may have been used strategically to draw together the fortunes of one individual/household and an ethnic group or the state, to promote an individual or family to a position of state leadership, or even negatively to identify an individual as a threat to the community. By examining particular examples or shifts in practice, wherein the boundaries between household or private cult and ethnic or state cult may have been redefined, the papers in this session will hopefully help us better understand developments in the religious practice of both the household and the state and the role that manipulating the boundaries between them played in constructing and representing personal power and charisma within the community.
Abstracts of 500-600 words for a paper to last between 15 to 20 minutes should be submitted by email attachment as .doc or .rtf files to socamr@gmail.com. Abstracts should contain a title and a word count, but no identifying information so that abstracts can be judged anonymously by our Program Committee. For further information about abstract format and requirements, please see the instructions on the APA's web site. The deadline for submission of abstracts is March 31, 2013 (note revised deadline).
For further information, contact Eric Orlin at eorlin@pugetsound.edu.
The Role of “Performance” in Late Antiquity
Organizer: Ralph Mathisen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity
The 2014 panel sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association, to be held in Jan. 2-5 in Chicago, will be devoted to the topic of “performance” in all of its manifestations: administrative, bureaucratic, political, social, and religious. Late Antiquity was a world of ceremony, ritual, and performance. Performative rituals greased the wheels of interaction between patrons and clients, bishops and laity, officials and populace, and emperors and subjects. Manifestations of performance cropped up everywhere, in mime and pantomime, in circus factions, in religious liturgy, in the audience halls of the rich and powerful. Symbolic actions were manifested in verbal cues and gestures that were understood only by other participants in the performance. Different forms of expression had to be decoded in order to be understood. Meaning often lay beneath the surface. Things were not always as they seemed. Wheels moved within wheels. This panel will look at different kinds of manifestations of “performance” in Late Antiquity, and consider why the concept of performance was so well suited to Late Antiquity as a uniquely defined period of history.
We invite the submission of abstracts offering new approaches to the many-sided issue of the role of “performance”, broadly writ, in Late Antiquity. One-page abstracts (ca. 400 words) for papers requiring a maximum of 20 minutes to deliver should be sent no later than March 15, 2013 (note revised deadline) by email attachment as .doc or .rtf files to Ralph Mathisen at ralphwm@illinois.eduor ruricius@msn.com. Please follow the APA's instructions for the format of individual abstracts. All submissions will be judged anonymously by two referees. Those whose papers are accepted must be members of the APA by March 1, 2013 and must attend the 2014 meeting in Chicago. For further information, please contact Ralph Mathisen, History, Classics, and Medieval Studies, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, at the email address above.
Talking Back to Teacher: Orality and Prosody in the Secondary and University Classroom
Chris Ann Matteo, Organizer
Sponsored by the Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature
Since Distler's Teach the Latin, I Pray You, Traupman’s Conversational Latin for Oral Proficiency and the target-language approach of Balme and Lawall's Athenaze, there has been an active reconsideration of the value of orality in the Greek and Latin classroom, whether the level is elementary, intermediate or advanced. How should both experienced and novice teachers incorporate oral Greek or Latin in the high school or college classroom? Currently, such topics are debated on social networks, where independent groups of like-minded spokespersons are debating the value of prosody, production of meaning the target language, assessment and philosophy.The papers for this panel are expected neither as apologetics for nor as censures of oral techniques of teaching.
This panel invites new contributions from the university or secondary classroom as well as the outreach community of oral reading enthusiasts. Some of the questions open to debate include: Is orality a fad or an indispensible teaching strategy? What theories guide the pedagogy of oral language acquisition? What texts are optimal for students at all levels, ages and interests? What training ought to be offered to extend the appreciation of oral Greek and Latin in classroom settings?What effects does orality in the classroom have on our understanding of ancient Roman or Greek poetics and versification, prose rhythm, figures of speech or sound? What is the benefit of oral teaching for the philologist? What effects could orality in the classroom have on our understanding of performance and genre?
The Society for the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin Literature (SORGLL) heartily encourages oral reading or performance of texts as part of the papers chosen for delivery.
Abstracts should be sent to Andrew Becker (Virginia Tech) andrew.becker@vt.eduby March 1 2013. Abstracts must conform to APA guidelines (see http://apaclassics.org/index.php/annual_meeting/instructions_for_authors_of_abstracts for details). All abstracts will be evaluated anonymously by three external referees.
Greek and Latin Linguistics
Jeremy Rau, Harvard University; Benjamin W. Fortson, University of Michigan; and Timothy Barnes, Harvard University, Organizers
Sponsored by The Society for the Study of Greek and Latin Languages and Linguistics
The Society for the Study of Greek and Latin Languages and Linguistics solicits submission of abstracts for its panel session at the Chicago meeting of the American Philological Association in 2014. Papers treating any topic in Greek or Latin language and linguistics will be considered for presentation. Abstracts will be evaluated on the basis of merit and relevance to the field. Each panelist will be given 15 minutes for presentation of his/her paper, to be followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Abstracts should be one page in length and should conform to the formatting guidelines listed in the APA Program Guide. Please send three copies of the abstract by March 15, 2013 (note revised deadline) to
Timothy Barnes
Department of the Classics
Boylston 2nd fl.
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA, 02138.
Virgil Commentaries: La Cerda to Horsfall
Organizer: Richard Thomas
Sponsored by the Vergilian Society
In his 2012 commentary on Aeneid 12 Richard Tarrant notes that La Cerda’s 1642 Virgil commentary has, particularly since it has become available online, been recognized “as a work of an engaged and often acute interpreter.” If La Cerda’s work may be seen as the most important early post-Renaissance attempt, rooted in some of the texts of what Ziolkowski and Putnam collected in The Vergilian Tradition, to explicate the text of this poet, we might ask why and how this enterprise has continued and evolved across the almost four centuries since La Cerda, soon to culminate in the forthcoming fifth single-book commentary by Nicholas Horsfall, on Aeneid 6.
The Vergilian Society would like to sponsor a panel devoted to papers exploring any aspect of this topic across the whole oeuvre of Virgil. Proposals might focus on specific commentaries, specific periods and the way the interests of those periods intersect with the commentaries, or on any number of critical issues whose journey across, and reception in, centuries of commentaries might be of interest. Papers on multi-book school commentaries (Page, Williams, etc.) are as welcome as those on more scholarly productions, from Cambridge Green and Yellows to Oxford Reds and Blues, and to the larger commentaries of Brill and de Gruyter.
Abstracts of 500 to 800 words, suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation, should be sent to by email to Richard Thomas at mailto:rthomas@fas.harvard.edu. Prof. Thomas can also be contacted at the Department of the Classics, Harvard University, 206 Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138; tel. 617 496-6061. Since all abstracts will be judged anonymously, please do not identify yourself in any way on the abstract page. All proposals must be received by February 1, 2013 and should be sent to Prof. Thomas electronically as email attachments.
Provincial Women in the Roman Imagination
Organizer: Paolo Asso, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Sponsored by the Women's Classical Caucus
Roman literature from the theater of Plautus and Terence to imperial epic and historiography is rich in memorable women who are not Roman. The fictional characters are usually Greek in early comedy, and they bear such imaginative names as Philocomasion or geographically descriptive ones like Andria. The historical figures tend to be politically prominent women, like the pluri-celebrated Cleopatra, Zenobia, Sophonisba, and Boudica. These characters, whether fictional or historical, are impressive literary figures and share a 'provincial' background. They are not from the Roman center but from the imperial periphery. Their non-Roman identities are part of the reason why they are mentioned in our sources. Two well-known examples of the literary and the historical type are Dido and Cleopatra, who have a very close association with the Caesars. When observed from the centralized perspective of the Roman imperial network, these 'provincial' women challenge the Roman conception of gendered roles but their non-Roman identities would benefit from a closer look. Anthony Augoustakis' Motherhood and the Other: Fashioning Female Power in Flavian Epic (2010), for example, devotes attention to Roman and non-Roman women in Silius' Punica. Clearly one promising avenue for future research on gender and identity must consider non-Roman female figures.
We solicit papers from literary scholars, historians, art historians, archeologists, and other students of material culture to explore questions of feminine identity related to non-Roman female figures in the Roman Empire. What perceptions of non-Roman womanhood are visible in our sources? Do the sources tell us anything about how Romans perceive non-Roman women? In what way does Punic/African Dido differ from the elegiac mistress? What significant power relationships emerge when we devote our attention to non-Roman queens in Roman sources? How is our modern reception of such female figures shaped by film and other media? The questions are by no means limited to the ones proposed. We welcome papers from a variety of theoretical approaches.
Abstracts of 500 to 800 words, suitable for a 15-20 minute presentation, should be sent as an email attachment (PDF) to: Amy Pistone, amypistone@gmail.com. You may also send submissions by regular mail to: Amy Pistone, University of Michigan, Classical Studies, 435 South State Street, 2160 Angell Hall, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48109, USA.
All abstracts will be judged anonymously. Please do not identify yourself in any way in the abstract itself. Please follow the formatting guidelines for individual abstracts that appear on the APA website. All proposals must be received by March 17, 2013 (note revised deadline).