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Special Events: Spring 2007
MARCH 3-4, 2006, Columbia University
Translatio: Translation and Cultural Appropriation in the Ancient World

501 Schermerhorn

The conference will explore the dynamics in ancient scribal cultures that developed in symbiosis with an older, more authoritative reference culture. For the Assyro-Babylonian Empires, Ancient Rome, and Early Japan the written records of Sumer, Greece, and China provided precedents in lexicon, genre, and rhetorical sophistication. Elite cultural literacy was defined as the mastery of a biliterate cultural canon, written in Sumerian and Akkadian, in Greek and Latin, or Sino-Japanese and Japanese. Biliteracy went far beyond the linguistic mastery of two different idioms, encompassing thorough familiarity with religious beliefs, strategies of governance, uses of textuality, and models of self-representation appropriated from the reference culture. This conference will explore similarities and differences in the cultural dynamics of ancient multiliterate societies and hopes to initiate a more vivid dialogue between translation theorists and philologists.

For the conference program, please click here.

To view the poster for the conference, please click here.

For any inquiries please contact the organizers, David Damrosch (dnd2@columbia.edu) and Wiebke Denecke (wd2118@columbia.edu).

Lunchtime Lectures: Spring 2006
Thursdays at Noon

All lectures are held in the Common Room on the second floor of the Heyman Center (except when noted otherwise,) which is located in the East Campus Residential Center of Columbia University. Lectures are free of charge and lunch is provided. 
 

February 2		Global Hierarchy and Comparative Critique: Bodies, Objects, and Values  Michael Herzfeld Harvard University
February 9		Acoustic Spectacle and Vernacular Aesthetics in the Chinese Martial-Arts Novel  Paize Keulemans Society of Fellows, Columbia University
February 16		The Political Landscapes of Archaic Greek Sicily  Trinity Jackman Society of Fellows, Columbia University
February 23		The Antisocial Profile: Cultural Pathologies and Moral Personalities in Greek Psychiatry  Elizabeth Ann Davis Society of Fellows, Columbia University
March 2		The Decapitated Head in Late-Imperial Chinese Literature  Tina Lu University of Pennsylvania
March 9		Loving Children: Greek Myths, Etruscan Mirrors, and the Issue of Orality  Francesco de Angelis Columbia University
March 23		Performing Panic: Methods for a Postdisciplinary Real  Jackie Orr Syracuse University
March 30		Collective Action in Greek Political Thought  Josh Ober Princeton University
April 6		Commodity Nationalism and the Lost Objects  Bill Brown University of Chicago