The Program Committee has approved a proposal to offer a seminar at the 2014 Annual Meeting in Chicago. 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 address follows 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 Chicago. 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:
Saturday, January 4, 2014
1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Varro, De Lingua Latina, and Intellectual Culture in the Late Republic (sponsored by the APA/ Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Fellowship Committee)
Christopher van den Berg, Amherst College, Organizer, mailto:cvandenberg@amherst.edu
Anthony Corbeill, University of Kansas, Organizer
This seminar considers the oeuvre of Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27 BCE), the most prolific thinker of the Late Republic. Using De lingua Latina as a starting point, panelists will address larger questions concerning Varro’s influence on hermeneutics, antiquarian scholarship, and the study of language. Varro's interpretive habits in these areas, including what can be gleaned from other works, will figure prominently in the discussion. The seminar seeks to uncover the workings of Varro’s texts by understanding him not as a transparent technical witness of the history of Latin and Rome, but as a sophisticated author in his own right.
Anthony Corbeill, University of Kansas,
Introduction (5 mins.)
1. David Blank, University of California, Los Angeles
Varro on the Kinship of Things and of Words (5 mins.)
2. Adam Gitner, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
Creeping Roots: Varro on Latin across Time and Space (5 mins.)
3. Diana Spencer, University of Birmingham
The Time, the Place: A Year with Varro (5 mins.)
4. Katharina Volk, Columbia University
The Antiquities of the Latin Language: Varro's Excavations of the Roman Past (5 mins.)
James E. G. Zetzel, Columbia University
Respondent (15 mins.)