Classics Colloquium Series
SPRING TERM 2007
23rd Jan: Aldo Setaoli (Professor Emeritus, University of Perugia) 'Some Idea's of Seneca's on Beauty'
13th Feb: Howard Chen (Columbia)
20th Feb: Glen Bowersock (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton)
27th Feb: Peter Davis (University of Tasmania)
6th Mar: Scott McGill (Rice University)
20th Mar: Patricia Johnson (Boston University)
27th Mar: Susan Jacobs (Columbia)
3rd Apr: Sarah Nooter (Columbia)
10th Apr: Zsuzsanna Varhelyi (Boston University)
17th Apr: Elton Barker (Oxford) "Oedipus Who Suffered Many Pains: Inter-Poetic Rivalry in the Odyssey"
20th Apr: Martin West (Oxford) "The Homeric Question Today"
24th Apr: Walter Ameling (Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena) "From
Persecution to Martyrdom: On the Change of an Early Christian Idea"
Back to Top
University Seminars in Classical Civilization
October 19, 2006
Philip van der Eijk
Medicine, Philosophy and Christianity in Late Antiquity: Nemesius of Emesa and John Philoponus on Soul, Body and the Brain.
This paper will be concerned with the creative ways in which two
authors of late antiquity in their accounts of the relationship between
body and soul made use of medical ideas about the brain and the nervous
system. We will be looking at Nemesius, the fourth century bishop of
Emesa (North Lebanon) and writer of the influential work "On the Nature
of Man", a treatise on philosophical anthropology based on
Judeo-Christian as well as Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and Galenic
thought; and at John Philoponus, the fifth/sixth century Alexandrian
philosopher, theologian, grammarian, natural scientist and author of
commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Neither of them was a medical
writer, but both had profound and up-to-date knowledge of medicine,
which they brought to bear on the vexed question of the relationship
between mind and body.
November 16, 2007
Francesco de Angelis
Did Roman Art Exist? Pliny and Artistic Identity
Modern difficulties in defining Roman art have their roots in the way
in which this topic is treated in ancient sources. Indeed, in spite of
the possible paradigm represented by Greek art and its
self-consciousness (expressed and fostered by the wealth of technical,
art historical, and theoretical literature that accompanied its
development from the Archaic age on), the Romanness of Roman art was
the subject of specific reflections only very rarely, and never in a
systematic way. Focussing especially on Pliny the Elder, we will try to
understand the reasons for this situation.
January 18, 2007
Katharina Volk
Horoscopes, Emperors, and the Date of Manilius' Astronomica
This talk considers the controversial issue of the date of
Manilius' Astronomica, a Latin didactic poem on astrology that was
written during either the reign of Augustus or that of Tiberius?or
begun under the former and finished under the latter. Apart from a
clear terminus post quem of AD 9, any reconstruction of the poem's time
of composition must rely on Manilius' own, typically obscure,
references to the emperor, who is frequently referred to in connection
with his horoscope or his astral immortality. In reviewing the
evidence, I offer a solution to the question of Manilian chronology and
also explore the fascinating nexus of power, propaganda, science, and
superstition in early Imperial Rome.
February 15, 2007
Felix Budelmann
The 'I' of early Greek lyric (again)
Recent scholarship has stressed the divide between Romantic notions
of the lyric self and the 'I' of archaic Greek lyric. Notions like
subjectivity, inwardness, or authenticity of feeling which lyric has
come to be associated with are often seen as deeply inappropriate for
talking about the fictive 'I' of early Greek performance culture. In my
seminar I will try to find a new perspective on this long-standing
topic. One issue I am particularly interested in is the difficulty of
determing whether any poetic 'I' is fictive or not, and the way poetry exploits this difficulty.
April 26, 2007
Simon Goldhill
Imaging Classical Desire: Victorians like Waterhouse and Warhol
Back to Top
Center for the Ancient Mediterranean Events, 2006-2007
DECEMBER 8th, 2006
Hippocrates and Hippocratic Medicine: The Current State of Research
Three of the world's leading scholars of ancient medicine will speak at the Center:
Jacques Jouanna (Sorbonne): The Origins of Man's Nature: Hippocrates, Galen, and the Other Hippocrates
Heinrich von Staden (Institute for Advanced Study): The Hellenistic Hippocrates
Philip van der Eijk ( University of Newcastle): Is there such a thing as Hippocratic medicine?
FEBRUARY 2nd, 2007
Professor Richard Thomas (Harvard University) will deliver
a lecture entitled 'Shadows are falling': Virgil, Radnóti, and Dylan,
and the Aesthetics of Pastoral Melancholy." Thomas begins with recent
neo-Kantian studies of the aesthetics of melancholy, and applies these
ideas to a number of case studies, chiefly the bucolics of Virgil, the
eclogues of Miklós Radnóti, and the utopian lyrics and music of Bob
Dylan. The 'pastoral' as a mode that participates in the melancholic,
though contemplation of war, dispossession and loss in general, is
shared by all three, who may also be set in a marked intertextual and
collaborative relationship, that modernizes and universalizes this
aspect of pastoral.
FEBRUARY 2nd, 2007
Professor Lee T. Pearcy (Episcopal Academy, Philadelphia)
will give a talk about the past, present, and future of teaching
classics in the USA. Dr. Pearcy is the author of among other works The
Grammar of Our Civility: Classical Education in America (2005).
FEBRUARY 2nd, 2007
Professor Polly Low (University of Manchester)
MARCH 2nd, 2007
Professor Garrett G. Fagan
(Pennsylvania State University) will deliver a lecture on "Roman Arenas and Crowd Dynamics"
MARCH 30th, 2007
Professor Catherine Hezser (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) will deliver a lecture on "Jewish Slavery in Antiquity."
APRIL 6th, 2007
Professor Stephen Halliwell (University of St. Andrews)
APRIL 13th-14th, 2007
AELIUS ARISTIDES
Conference speakers will include Laurent Pernot, Estelle Oudot, Carlo
Franco, Suzanne Said, Luana Quattrocelli, Janet Downie, Alexia
Petsalis-Diomidis, Dana F. Fields, Glen Bowersock, Christopher Jones,
Raffaella Cribiore, Ewen Bowie, and Charles A. Behr. (program schedule in .doc format)
APRIL 20th, 2007
Professor Sheila Dillon (Duke University)
will deliver a lecture on "Portraits as Exchange: Women and the System
of Statuary Honors in Ancient Greece." Her recently published book is
Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles
(Cambridge University Press).
Back to Top
|
