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The Getty Scholars Program at the Villa for the 2020/2021 term will focus on the ancient cultures of the Levant and their relations with the classical world. Lying on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean, the Levant was a crucial crossroads between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the kingdoms of the Near East. Home to the ancient peoples of Phoenicia, Ugarit, Canaan, Philistia, Jordan, Israel, and Judah, this region participated in a vibrant Bronze-Age network of trade that flourished for many centuries until a combination of warfare, migration and famine around 1200 BCE destroyed these palace societies.
Central: February 26-29, 2020, Palmer House Hilton Chicago
This is a call for submissions of papers to be presented to the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy.
The Deadline for Submission of papers is August 1.
a) To have your paper considered, you need to be a member of the Society for 2019/20 - a form is attached, and it needs to come back via regular mail, not as an attachment!
b) You should submit your paper as an attachment to an email addressed to apreus@binghamton.edu. Your email message is your cover letter; it should include your name, address, academic affiliation (as of 2019/20), and the title of the paper. Note if you would prefer the Central or Pacific Division, or either! The paper itself should be prepared for blind (anonymous) review, and IT MUST BE IN DOC, DOCX, OR RTF FORMAT! NOT PDF! Papers may include "real Greek" if it is in a Unicode font.
The Program Committee has decided that authors who had a paper accepted by the Society for presentation at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association or the Society for Classical Studies during the past year should not be considered.
Learn about our affiliated groups, old and new!
In June the SCS Program Committee chartered three groups that are already doing great work. SCS is delighted to welcome them as affiliates:
- Multiculturalism, Race & Ethnicity in Classics Consortium (MRECC)
- Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus
- Quintilian Society
Look out for their events at the 2020 Annual Meeting.
Upon a recommendation by the Society for Classical Studies, FIEC has approved a statement on the format of abstracts and keywords for the submission of articles
FIEC STATEMENT
L’Année Philologique is the main database for publications in Classical studies. In the interest of all scholars, authors and researchers, it seems important to define some basic requirements that will make it easier for the local branches of L’Année Philologique to analyze the entries. The following is a recommendation made to all associations of Classical studies affiliated to FIEC. Associations are kindly asked to circulate this statement among their members. In view of the ever-growing number of articles and chapters in collective volumes processed for registration by L’Année Philologique, and in order to reduce the amount of work required of the various branches of L’Année Philologique, it is recommended that journal and volume editors regard it as a best practice of the efficient analysis of the data that each article or chapter be accompanied by a brief abstract and a list of keywords. To ensure the utility of abstracts and keywords for the efficient analysis of data for L’Année Philologique, please take note of the following guidelines:
The new Classics Everywhere initiative, launched by the SCS in 2019, supports projects that seek to engage communities all over the US and Canada with the worlds of Greek and Roman antiquity in new and meaningful ways. As part of this initiative the SCS has been funding a variety of projects ranging from children’s programs to teaching Latin in a prison. In this post we focus on two programs that bring the study of Greek and Roman antiquity to two traditionally underserved communities: incarcerated students in a correctional facility and the racially, ethnically, and economically diverse community in Winnipeg, Canada.
There is a pressing need to make Classics more open and inclusive, and to diversify the voices dominating the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. A growing number of classicists are rethinking the field's often unspoken assumptions, exploring the ways in which contemporary scholarship may be affirming or challenging existing social structures, and reaching out to more diverse audiences, to encourage new responses and perspectives.
Classical Studies in the 21st Century: More Relevant Than Ever
The AIA-SCS joint ad hoc committee on the future of classics and archaeology met earlier this year to discuss pressures common to both fields. The group agreed to create a document that can be used to remind college and university administrators of what we do and our relevance. The joint statement entitled “Classical Studies in the 21st Century: More Relevant Than Ever,” is below and also available as a PDF download. Department chairs and other departmental members are welcome to use it as talking points with decision-makers at your institutions, be they chairs, deans, provosts, chancellors and some other administrator, as a reminder of the continuing and important benefits of our fields. You may use the entire statement or customize it to meet the specific needs of your department and profile of your institution. We realize that there are many successful advocacy strategies, and we hope this brief statement will join them. If you have already successfully advocated to preserve or expand your department, let us know what worked.
FIEC resolution towards supporting the registration of Ancient Greek and Latin in the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage
(approved by the FIEC General Assembly of Delegates, London July 4th, 2019)
The International Federation of Associations of Classical Studies (FIEC) supports the registration of Ancient Greek and Latin in the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. Those two languages have had a deep impact on the Mediterranean area (in a wide sense) over several millenia; this impact is still to be felt very strongly today, not only in that area, but also in the world at large.
Ancient Greek was the main language spoken and written in Archaic and Classical Greece, as well as in the whole Eastern Mediterranean from the Hellenistic period till the end of the Byzantine period. In contact with other languages (notably Semitic languages and Latin), it has gradually evolved without changing its basic structure, to become Modern Greek. Latin started in the Italic peninsula and, as Roman power extended over the centuries, has spread to most areas of present-day Europe, where it evolved to produce the Romance languages. Through the process of colonization, Latin has also spread to other parts of the world, notably the Americas.
ToposText is a set of tools that projects the geographic elements of ancient texts onto a mapping of the ancient world. Users can follow a classical reference from place-to-text, or from text-to-place. Zooming in on Thebes and clicking on “Cadmeia,” for example, takes us to 63 text entries, such as the Bios Ellados of Heracleides Criticus; clicking on Bios Ellados takes us to 36 map locations through 78 text references. The text is displayed in public-domain English translation (default) with a link to the original ancient Greek (in this case, at Bibliotheca Augustana). The places are located through a Google Map interface.
Sixth Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Heritage of Western Greece
with special emphasis on
ἀρετή aretē: virtue, excellence, goodness
and a pre-conference seminar on Gorgias of Leontini
plus a post-conference tour of Greek cities in Calabria
The cultural and intellectual legacy of Western Greece—the coastal areas of Southern Italy and Sicily settled by Hellenes in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE—is sometimes overlooked in academia. Yet evidence suggests that poets, playwrights, philosophers, and other maverick intellectuals found fertile ground here for the growth of their ideas and the harvesting of their work. The goal of the Fonte Aretusa organization is to revive the distinctive spirit of Western Greece by exploring it from a variety of disciplinary perspectives including art history, archaeology, classics, drama, epigraphy, history, literature, mythology, philosophy and religion.
