2015 - 2016 Archive
Embedded Files
Medieval Textualities: A Symposium
Friday, May 6, 10:30am - 6:00pm
Commonwealth Room, Newcomb Hall
They symposium is in honor of Anthony Spearing on the occasion of his retirement.
Martien A. Halvorson-Taylor, University of Virginia
"Love in the Ancient World: A Critical Look at Song of Songs in the Hebrew Bible"
Tuesday, May 3, 12:00pm
Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Conference Center
145 Ednam Drive
In the Bible, which has surprisingly little to say about human love and even less to say about passion and sexual desire, the Song of Songs is an unusual book. God is not explicitly mentioned and the book is filled with expressions of human love, not to mention overtly sexual metaphors, that make it seem something of an interloper. In this talk, we will explore how the Song of Songs' use of love language makes it distinct from much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, what it can tell us about love in the ancient world, and why this matters.
Stocker Lecture
Katharina Volk, Columbia University
"The Importance of Being Cato: Engaged Philosophy in the Late Republic"
Thursday, April 21, 5:00pm
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
Leslie Brubaker, University of Birmingham
"Teenagers of Byzantium"
Wednesday, April 20, 6:30pm
Campbell 160
Classics Graduate Student Conference
University of Virginia
Saturday, April 16
Workshop on Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
David Frankfurter, Boston University
Seminar "Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze"
Tuesday, April 12, 11:00am-12:30pm
Newcomb 389
Article under discussion available HERE.
Workshop on Religion and Soiety in Greco-Roman Antiquity
David Frankfurter, Boston University
Lecture: "A Site of Blessings, Dreams, and Wonders: The Egyptian Saint’s Shrine as Crucible of Christianization"
Monday, April 11, 5:00pm
Nau Hall 211
Ancient History talk/seminar
Cedric Brelaz, University of Strasbourg and the Center for Hellenic Studies
"Democracy and Civic Participation in Greek Cities under Roman Imperial Rule: Political Practice and Culture in the Post-Classical Period"
Friday, April 8, 4:00pm
Nau Hall 342
background reading available HERE.
Wheedon Lecture:
Lukas Nickel, Reader in Chinese Art History and Archaeology, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
"The First Emperor of China and the Wider World: Evidence for Cross-Asian Communication in the 3rd Century BC"
Thursday, April 7, 6:00 pm
Campbell 153
The 3rd century BC saw a dramatic change in the political and cultural landscape of China. The rulers of the state of Qin joined all East Asian polities into an empire that set the foundations of China as we know it today. Nickel explores how the First Emperor of Qin (259-210 BC) utilised indigenous and alien traditions to create and consolidate this vast state. Although many aspects of his actions followed local practices established long before the emperor’s lifetime, some characteristics of the public presentation of the empire cannot easily be associated with Qin or other East Asian traditions, and point instead towards cross-Asian inspiration. Nickel places Qin dynasty material culture into this wider pan-Asian context.
Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Series
Colleen Manassa Darnell, Yale University
"The Shape of Things Already Come: 3-D Imaging in a Late Roman Desert Settlement"
Thursday, April 7, 5:30pm
Campbell 160
PreModerns Meeting
Thursday, April 7, 3:30-5:00pm
Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library ScanLab
refreshments provided
The topic of the meeting that afternoon will be devoted to: 1) discussion of D. Frankfurter’s article, ‘Martyrology and the Prurient Gaze’ in advance of his seminar on the subject on April 12 and 2) collecting our thoughts on the next academic year’s activities for the Premoderns.
Three Day Scholar in Residence
Tessa Rajak, Professor Emerita of the University of Reading
Lecture: "How Josephus The Jew Shaped Christianity"
Friday, April 1, 5:00pm
Minor Hall 125
Flavius Josephus started life as a prominent priest in Jerusalem under the Romans. He participated in the great Jewish revolt of 66-73 CE against Roman rule, but he also opposed it. He witnessed the fall of the Jerusalem Temple and the destruction of his home city. He gained imperial patronage and ended his life in Rome. In his Jewish War, Antiquities, and Against Apion, all written in Greek, Josephus also documented the Jewish communities in the land of Israel and in the diaspora within the Roman imperial context; he retold biblical history from Genesis to his own day; and he ended up defending Judaism against its critics. Though many Jews deemed him a traitor, his conviction that God had deserted the Jews contributed to the theology of the early Church. The paragraph about Jesus Christ found in all the manuscripts of the Antiquities particularly endeared him to the early Christians. Josephus’s importance to the Christian world through the centuries will be the main subject of this lecture.
Tessa Rajak, an expert in the social and cultural history of the Jews in Hellenistic and Roman periods and early Christianity, will offer a 3-day scholar in residence at UVA, March 30-April 2, 2016. She is a professor emerita of ancient history at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, where she taught ancient history, and a senior research fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. Her publications include The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction; Josephus: the Historian and His Society; and Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible and the Ancient Jewish Diaspora. Rajak received her B.A. and Ph.D. from Oxford University. During her residency, Prof. Rajak will offer a public lecture and a seminar on the general theme social contexts of scriptural transmission.
Stephen Heyworth, University of Oxford
"The End of Ovid's March"
Thursday, March 31, 5:00pm
Cocke Hall, Gibson Room
Three Day Scholar in Residence
Tessa Rajak, Professor Emerita of the University of Reading
Colloquium: “Mothers as Martyrs: The Maccabaean Mother among Jews and Christians”
Wednesday, March 30, 5:00pm
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
light reception to follow
Why does a mother make a particularly good martyr? Why and to whom are martyr-mothers useful? I shall consider these questions in the light of the changing traditions about the Maccabaean martyrs, the aged Eleazar, a mother and her seven sons. Their deaths formed part of the Jewish resistance against the religious persecution of the Seleucid King Antiochus IV in the second century BCE. The tradition about these martyrs was enshrined in the Second and Fourth Books of the Maccabees, which were soon adopted and treasured by the Christian Church. I argue that from a very early stage, commemoration of the mother in particular, and the martyrs together, was a cross-cultural phenomenon, involving Jews, Christians, and pagan Greeks too, in the great Syrian city of Antioch.
Archaeological Institute of America Lecture
Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom, Wittenberg University
"Archaeology of Monastic Communities in Late Antique Egypt"
Tuesday, March 29, 5:30 pm
Campbell 160
Classical Association of the Middle West and South
March 16-19, 2016
Williamsburg, VA
10th Annual Elizabeth Frances Jones Lecture in Classical Studies
Michael Danti, Boston University & American Schools of Oriental Research
“Iconoclasm, Pillage, and Plunder: The Cultural Heritage Crisis in Syria and Iraq”
Wednesday, March 16, 1:00 pm
Gaines Theatre (Freeman Center)
reception to follow
Scholars' Lab
Sarah Bond, University of Virginia
"Linking the Ancient World: Pleiades Workshop with Sarah Bond"
Tuesday, March 15, 10:00 am
Alderman 421
At this workshop, Associate editor Sarah Bond will introduce the Pleiades community to participants. She will walk them through the history and layout of the gazetteer, discuss the popular contribution and review of our linked geodata, and then help participants make a map of sites within the ancient Mediterranean. Persons at all levels of experience (from "interested" to "expert") are welcome to participate.
Fotini Kondyli, University of Virginia
"Living with the Dead: Sacred Geographies of Memory and Belonging in Byzantine Athens"
Thursday, February 25, 2:00-3:15 pm
New Cabell 332.
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, February 23, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Obear Chair candidate campus visit
Kathryn Morgan, University of California Los Angeles
"Kings and Generals: Simonides and the Diplomacy of Victory"
Thursday, February 18, 5:00pm
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, February 16, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Obear Chair candidate campus visit
Bill Allan, University College, Oxford
"Solon and the Rhetoric of stasis"
Thursday, February 11, 5:00pm
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, February 9, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Obear Chair candidate campus visit
Ivana Petrovic, Durham University
"Royal Gods and Divine Kingship in Hellenistic Poetry"
Thursday, February 4, 5:00pm
Gibson Room, Cocke Hall
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Ted Lendon, UVA
Tuesday, February 2, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Archaeology Brown Bag
Sophie Crawford Waters, University of Pennsylvania
"Context and Connectivity: Rethinking Italic Architectural Terracottas (3rd-1st cent. BCE)."
Friday, Jan. 29, 4:00pm
Brooks Hall Conference Room
Archaeology Brown Bag
Jacqueline Huwyler, University of Virginia
'Frontier Foodways: Inter-Cultural Interactions and Ethnic Identity at 12th- and 13th-Dynasty Egyptian Fortresses in Nubia'
Friday, Nov. 20, 4:00pm
Fayerweather 215
Light refreshments provided
Friends of Classics Lecture
Ted Lendon, University of Virginia
"Ancient Greek Combat: What can Modern Riots Tell us?"
Thursday, Nov. 19, 5:00pm
Rouss 403
Reception to follow
Workshop on Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Christopher Faraone, University of Chicago
[seminar] "Ancient Greek Amulets: Protection, Healing, and the Acquisition of Abstract Benefits"
Thursday, Nov. 12, 12:30-2:00pm
Newcomb 389
Workshop on Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
Christopher Faraone, University of Chicago
"Ancient Greek Magic, Domestic Religion and the Rituals of Women: Connecting the Dots"
Wednesday, Nov. 11, 5pm
Rouss 403
Archaeological Institute of America Kress Lecture Series
Lorenzo Nigro, La Sapienza University, Rome
"Stars sparkling on the waters: The Temple of Baal 'Addir/Poseidon at Motya and the History of the Mediterranean"
Sunday, November 8, 5:30pm
Campbell 160
Premoderns Meeting
"We're Getting the Band Back Together"
Thursday, November 5, 5:00 - 7:00pm
Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library
Yes, we are all back. Given our impressive new website, the founders of the preModerns@ UVA thought this week was a good time to bring all our friends and colleagues together to discuss where we are headed. Many of the new initiatives at UVA bespeak of possibilities for the preModerns. We plan to have discussion on the website, our meeting schedule this year, and proposals for funding more collaborative endeavours. There will also be food and drink.
John Miller, of Classics fame, has suggested a little light ready for this first meeting. Two articles by Chris Faroane will be the discussion point. The readings have been linked to the event announcement HERE.
Medieval Studies Program Lecture
Tariq Jaffer, Amherst College
"A Thematic Approach to Covenant Theology in Islam"
Monday, November 2, 12:30pm
Nau 342
The idea of a covenant or contractual relationship between God and human beings is a historical theme that Islam shares with other cultural and religious traditions that emerged in the Ancient Near East and that later emerged in the Reformed tradition of Christianity. This lecture focuses on the history of the idea of covenant in the Qur'an and on the debates surrounding it in Islamic theology and exegesis. It adopts a thematic approach, and it attempts to show how the seed of the idea of covenant became enmeshed in a complex web of controversies. By analyzing such controversies, this lecture identifies several concepts that reveal distinguishign features that set off Islam from other cultural and religious traditions.
Speaker: Tariq Jaffer received his secondary education at Upper Canada College and his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. He then spent two and a half years at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec), where he undertook coursework in Islamic Studies, including classical Arabic and Persian. From McGill he went on to pursue his Ph.D in Religious Studies at Yale University, where he studied the Qurʾān and Qurʾānic commentaries, Islamic theology, Aristotle and medieval philosophy, classical Arabic poetry, Persian (Middle and Modern), and Islamic Mysticism. Tariq joined the Religion Department at Amherst College in 2008.
Alumni Lecture
Chris Nappa, University of Minnesota
"Catullus Confidential: Prurience and the Art of Misreading”
Friday, Oct. 30, 5:00pm
Gibson Room
Christopher Nappa is Associate Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, where he has also served as Chair of Department and won a graduate teaching award. He received his PhD here at the University of Virginia in 1996, with a dissertation on Catullus. His interests include Latin Poetry, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and Satire. He has published on Virgil, Catullus, and Juvenal.
Tuesday Classics Luncheon - Finale of the Fall
Tuesday, Oct. 27, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Julian Weiss, King’s College London
“Josephus in Early Modern Spain: 1492 and the Death and Life of Jews,”
Monday, October 26, 3:00pm
New Cabell Hall 236.
Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Studies at King’s College London. He is the author of The Poet's Art: Literary Theory in Castile, c. 1400-60 (1990) and The ‘Mester de clerecía’: Intellectuals and Ideologies in Thirteenth-Century Castile (2006). He has also edited or co-edited several volumes of essays and published numerous essays on medieval and early modern poetry, reading and censorship, and gender and sanctity.
This talk is sponsored by Jewish Studies, the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, and the Corcoran Department of History Early Modern Study Group.
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, Oct. 20, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Constantine Lecture
Donald Mastronarde,
University of California Berkeley
"The Euripidean Scholia and Educational Practices in Antiquity and Byzantium"
Monday, Oct. 19, 5:00pm
Rouss 403
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, Oct. 13, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Classics Undergraduate Lecture
Lily Panoussi, William and Mary
"Cougars in Rome? Older Women, Younger Men in Roman Literature"
Friday, Oct. 9, 5:00pm
Rouss Hall room 403
Reception to follow
The Department of Classics is very pleased to welcome Professor Vassiliki Panoussi, recently awarded the 2015 Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence at the College of William and Mary. Professor Panoussi's research focuses on Latin Literature and women and gender in antiquity.
Charles Stanish,
UCLA Cotsen Institute
"Foundations of Andean State Formation"
Friday, Oct. 9, 1pm
Brooks Hall 2nd floor conference room
Reception to follow
Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Series
Malcolm Bell III, Professor Emeritus of University of Virginia
"A Sicillian Greek Agora"
Wednesday, September 30, 5:30pm
Campbell 158
Reception to follow
The Charlottesville Society of the Archaeological Institute of America was founded 50 years ago and held its first lecture on October 15, 1965. The September 30th lecture will celebrate the founding and the first lecture.
The Art Department played a role in the founding of the C’ville AIA Society in that David Lawall, then on the Art Department faculty, was one of the founding members, as was his wife, Willa. (David is now retired having been director of the Museum some time ago). Willa Lawall still attends every AIA lecture and will make a few brief remarks about the founding.
This occassion is, however, a triple celebration! 2015 is the 60th anniversary of the Morgantina Excavations! The last 35 of those years have been associated with the University of Virginia, with Malcolm Bell as Director, a cause for celebration in its own right.
Professor Bell is this year's Norton Lecturer for the AIA. The Norton Lectureship is one of the three most distinguished lectureships within the AIA (including the Joukowski and the Kress).
In addition, at the January 2016 General Meeting, the AIA will award its Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement to Malcolm Bell.
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Tuesday, Sept. 29, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45
Room E1 of the Garden Room
Tuesday Classics Luncheon
Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Wellesley College
Tuesday, September 22nd, lunch at 12:30, talk at 1:00, and adjournment at 1:45.
Cocke Hall, Gibson Room
Mary Lefkowitz, Professor Emerita of Wellesley College
"Why We Can't Understand Greek Drama"
Monday, September 21, 5:00pm
Rouss 403
Reception to follow
Mary Lefkowitz, whose career at Wellesley College was distinguished by many important books, has added to our debt to her by writing about the gods in Euripidean tragedy. Having shown earlier that there is no presumptive reason to trust what later antiquity says about Euripides' views about anything, she has shown that reading the text of the plays without presuppositions derived from the untrustworthy biographical tradition gives us a Euripides who presents the gods pretty much as they are presented in serious poetry elsewhere. There is no reason to regard him as issuing a challenge to received views and much reason to see his presentation as belonging within the roomy fabric of archaic and classical views of the operation of the divine within the world.
Workshop on Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
James Rives, University of North Carolina
Seminar: ‘Animal Sacrifice and Political Identity in Rome and Judaea’
Friday, September 18, 3:00-4:30 pm
Cocke Hall, Gibson Room
The seminar will discuss the attached recent paper by Prof. Rives. All are welcome to attend.
Download the reading for this seminar HERE.
Prof. Rives will give a seminar 3–4:30 on a recent paper of his.
An event of the Workshop of Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Sponsored by the Departments of Art, Classics, History, and Religious Studies, with the generous support of the Page-Barbour Fund.
Workshop on Religion and Society in Greco-Roman Antiquity
James Rives, University of North Carolina
Lecture: 'Social Power and Religious Communication in the Roman Empire: Orthopraxy and Orthodoxy'
Thursday, September 17, 5:00 pm
Cocke Hall, Gibson Room
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