"Listening to Cynthia Shelmerdine describe the writing on a Greek tablet from more than 3,000 years ago, it’s like she was looking over the scribe’s shoulder as he worked. She points out details and nuance of technique, the condition of the tablet and what it means, literally, and for the world of Greek archaeology." Read more …
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I have always enjoyed Latin class because it felt like a puzzle, much like math. Find the verb, find the noun that matches with the right case, number, and gender, then piece it all together. I had never connected with the language beyond its algebraic nature until my teacher gave me the opportunity to take ownership over the material — with a self-directed research assignment to be presented at a colloquium. Completing this project during a period of remote learning, I felt inspired by the ability to have greater independence and take control of my own learning. On top of all that, we would be presenting our work to the entire school and the wider community at the end of the year.
But first, I needed to choose what I wanted to study.
Research ideas often develop out of chance encounters or unplanned circumstances. My dissertation project was born just like that: when the intersection between an author that I was falling in love with and a pressing question that emerged from a completely unrelated event started bugging my young researcher’s mind.
I completed my M.A. by producing a translation, with commentary, of the letters of Libanius of Antioch to Datianus. A Greek sophist under the Roman empire, Libanius held the chair of rhetoric in Antioch for the greater part of the second half of the 4th century CE. His immense production, often mined for its wealth of historical information, has been the object of a resurgence of interest in the past few decades. I started working on his epistolary corpus only a few years after the publication of a precious volume that collected the state of the art in Libanian scholarship. A teacher myself and forced to maintain long-distance relationships with friends and family in my home country, I felt in familiar territory making the acquaintance of this ancient teacher, who gracefully preserved copies of some 1500 letters he sent to friends, students’ parents, bureaucrats, politicians, governors, and emperors of his time.
Seneca 2022 --- SPECIAL/FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline for proposals: March 30, 2022
The Centre for Classical Studies of the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon is organizing an International Conference on Seneca to promote and encourage a critical reflection on the permanence of themes, values, perspectives and representations of Seneca’s works in Western literature and culture.
The Conference will take place between 17-20 October 2022, and, through the interdisciplinary debate of the contribution given by the experiences of researchers from different fields of study, it aims to:
- determine how Seneca became one of the most prominent figures in Western culture;
(From the Classics Department at Emory University)
Join us for two weeks in Florence on this unique learning experience that brings language to life in the real spaces where women wrote Latin. Includes 6 hours daily content, site visits, immersive learning, text-based activities and optional cultural programming every evening.*
When: July 17 - 31, 2022.
Where: Florence, Italy.
The Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) has extended its Call for Proposals for the 2022 Fall Annual Meeting submission deadline to Monday, March 28, 2022.
You can read more about the Annual Meeting here: https://caas-cw.org/2021/12/17/call-for-papers-caas-2022-fall-annual-meeting/ .
The full CFP can be downloaded here: CAAS 2022 CFP.
Because it’s spirits, we ain’t even really rappin’
We just letting our dead homies tell stories for us.
Tupac Shakur, saying these words to journalist Mats Nileskär in 1994, articulated the centrality of community and collective history to hip hop and offered his response to the vexed question of the wellspring of poetic inspiration. Nearly two decades after Tupac’s murder, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper Kendrick Lamar gave new life to those words in his track “Mortal Man,” recasting Nileskär’s interview and intersplicing Tupac’s voice with his own, so that it is Lamar who seems to be in dialogue with Tupac. The result is an impossible conversation between the living and the dead: impossible because Tupac died when Lamar was just nine years old. But in highlighting and embodying Tupac’s perception that rap gives voice to the stories of one’s dead comrades, Lamar’s “sampling” of the conversation centers Tupac’s vision and acknowledges the debt Lamar owes to his predecessors, cementing the connection between them.
If you attended the 2022 Annual Meeting earlier this year — and if you woke up bright and early on Saturday morning! — you may have been lucky enough to tune in to the very first panel sponsored by the Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Initiative (AnWoMoCo). Recent recipients of a microgrant from this program gathered from all over America, Canada, and even Ghana to present seven exciting public-facing projects that aim to bring Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies out of the ivory tower. The goal is to reach audiences, organizations, and people who might otherwise never have the opportunity to engage with the history, literature, language, archaeology, culture, texts, and individuals of the ancient Mediterranean world.
Ten presenters shared their projects, which ranged from primary school curricula, prison programming, visual and performing arts, and digital initiatives. I was beyond inspired by all of the incredible people who presented that day, so I jumped at the chance to summarize their contributions here for those who missed it.
(publishing on behalf of Thea Sommerschield, a Marie Curie fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and Fellow at Harvard’s CHS)
Res Difficiles: A Conference on Challenges and Pathways for Addressing Inequity in Classics
When: May 20, 2022 , 9:00am - 4:00pm
Where: Live-streamed via Zoom [Registration now open]
Classical Studies at Boston University and Classics, BU Center for the Humanities, Philosophy, & Religious Studies at the University of Mary Washington present Res Difficiles: A Conference On Challenges and Pathways for Addressing Inequity In Classics. [Res Difficiles 3: Difficult Conversations in Classics].
Dr. Kelly Nguyen (Stanford University) will deliver the keynote address.
The event will be live-streamed via Zoom, and will be live-captioned. Participants/viewers may live-tweet the event on the hashtag #ResDiff3.
You can find more information about the speakers and sessions here: https://resdifficiles.com/
You can register here.
Any questions can be directed to the co-organizers: Hannah Čulík-Baird and Joseph Romero.
