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"WARNING: Storm Approaching": Weather, the Environment, and Natural Disasters in the Ancient Mediterranean
Keynote Speaker: Clara Bosak-Schroeder (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Scientific, aesthetic, and religious conceptions of weather events appear throughout Classical antiquity, as the Greeks and Romans attempted to make sense of environmental phenomena. Often, these events were explained as expressions of divine wrath or favor. Storms and natural disasters figured as literary devices, for example to delay narrative action or as metaphors for the cyclic nature of human life. Climate, broadly defined, was thought to determine national character, and weather played a critical role in military expeditions. Recently, scholars have made considerable advances in applying principles of bioarchaeology to the study of the ancient world. Hand in hand with these, theorists working with the tools of ecocriticism envision a humanities broader than humans, accounting for the whole natural world.
Modern cinema and Greek tragedy illustrate that few things elicit a fear more profound than parents killing children. Horror movies have often grappled with figures of “monstrous” mothers in particular, from the obsessive, hypochondriac Sonia Kaspbrack in Stephen King's IT (1986), to the lonely, murderous Olivia Crain in Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House (2018). In Greek tragedy, too, mothers are often monsters: women like Medea, Agave or Althaea are all tragic examples of women who have killed their children. In both genres, these gestures of extreme violence are meant to shock and unsettle the audience by pushing back against “normal” familial bonds, bringing into question relationships of gender, the body and motherhood.
The Outreach Prize Committee is delighted to award the 2019 Outreach Prize of the Society for Classical Studies to Dr. Salvador Bartera, Assistant Professor of Classics and Dr. Donna Clevinger, Professor of Communication and Theatre at Mississippi State University in Starkville, Mississippi. For the past five years, Professors Bartera and Clevinger have organized “Classical Week” at MSU, which includes a two-night run of an ancient comedy or tragedy and a colloquium about an aspect of the performance. This joint venture of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and the Shakouls Honors College showcases the interdisciplinarity of the event, in which Dr. Clevinger choreographs and directs the production, Dr. Bartera serves as dramaturge, and both collaborate on the colloquium.
The Classics Program of the Department of Classical and Oriental Studies at Hunter College invites you to the Annual E. Adelaide Hahn Lecture.
Speaker: Emily Greenwood, Professor of Classics, Yale University
Friday November 8, 2019
- Pre-Lecture Reception: 5:30-6:00 pm
- Lecture: 6:00-7:00 pm “Verso Poetics: Black Women Poets and Classics”
- Post-Lecture Reception: 7:00-7:30 pm
Location: Hunter College, 695 Park Ave., NY, NY 10065
8th floor Faculty / Staff Dining Room, Hunter West Building, 68th St. and Lexington Ave.
This event is open to the public. If you are a guest at Hunter, please bring a picture ID and stop at the Welcome Desk in the lobby of Hunter West Building, SW corner of 68th St. & Lex. (Then take the elevator to the 8th floor or the escalator to 3 and then the elevator to 8.)
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The deadline to apply for the TLL Fellowship is November 8, 2019. The application includes many parts, and so should be started early.
Applications must be received by the deadline of Friday, November 8, 2019, at 5:00 p.m., Eastern Time. Applications should be submitted as e-mail attachments to Dr. Helen Cullyer, Executive Director, Society for Classical Studies, xd@classicalstudies.org.
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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 encourage audiences to look at the ancient material and traditional practices with a new lens, with a comparative and critical eye.
“Causes and Causality in Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition”
This Conference is intended to provide a formal occasion and central location for philosophers and scholars of the Midwest region (and elsewhere) to present and discuss their current work on Aristotle and his interpreters in ancient and medieval philosophy.
Presented by the Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy with the support of the Department of Philosophy at Marquette University
14th London Ancient Science Conference 2019
The 14th London Ancient Science conference will be held at the Institute of Classical Studies, Senate House, University of London from Monday, February 17th to Friday, February 21st 2020.
Abstracts of around 200 words should be sent to Prof. Andrew Gregory (andrew.gregory@ucl.ac.uk) by 10th November. Decisions by mid November.
Papers are welcomed from established academics, postdocs and postgraduate students. Papers are welcomed on science in any ancient culture treated historically, philosophically, sociologically or technically. Science is construed quite broadly and may include epistemology, metaphysics and ontology relating to the natural world.
This year the keynote speaker will be Prof. Dan Graham
Paper proposals are welcomed for these sessions as well as any other ancient science topic.
There is a website for this conference at:
Res Difficiles: A Conference On Challenges and Pathways for Addressing Inequity In the Ancient Greek and Roman World
Organizers: Hannah Çulik-Baird (Boston University) and Joseph Romero (University of Mary Washington)
Date: May 15, 2020
Place: Campus of the University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, Virginia), HCC 136
One of the great benefits of the shift from a pedagogue-centered to a student-aware or student-centered classroom is that we listen more attentively to how our students experience the content of what we read. A decided strength of Classical Studies is the simultaneous proximity and distance—temporally, geographically, ideologically—of the ancient Greek and Roman world. That distance is felt more keenly when potentially difficult subjects (res difficiles) in our readings—domination, inequity, violence both sexual and otherwise—present themselves for inspection. Often the underlying source of the dissonance or disconnect is the distance in our perceptions of social justice.
The 50th Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest (CAPN) will take place at The University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, on March 20-21, 2020. The keynote speaker will be Andrew Stewart, Emeritus Professor in the Department of the History of Art (UC Berkeley). This keynote lecture will be open to the general public as well as to conference attendees.
Call for Papers: We invite papers on any aspect of the ancient Mediterranean world, including Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Ancient Near East. We seek those that are likely to be of broad interest and to make connections among different elements of the ancient world. Such connections may cross traditional disciplinary boundaries (such as archaeology, drama, history, literature, and philosophy) or geographical boundaries (e.g., looking at intersections between Greek society and Roman society) or even temporal boundaries (including receptions of Mediterranean antiquity in later places and times). It should be noted, however, that papers on narrower topics are also invited. Furthermore, we welcome pedagogical papers, especially those that address the instruction of Latin and Greek at the primary, secondary, and university levels. Teachers and students of Classics at any level of instruction (K-12, college, or university) are encouraged to submit abstracts.
