Graduate Student Conference

Corpora Mutata: Transformations of the Body in Classical Antiquity

April 28 - 29

Stocker Lecture

Antony Augoustakis, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Death, Burial, and Ritual in Flavian Poetry”

Friday, April 20, 5:00pm

Rouss 410

Medieval Studies Lectures

Marisa Galvez, Stanford University

“How Medieval Lyric Makes Political and Aesthetic Communities: From the Troubadours to the Avant-Garde”

Thursday, April 12, 5:30pm

Campbell Hall 153

This paper examines two ways in which medieval lyric makes communities. The first is political and synchronic. During the period of medieval crusades spanning 1095-1300, poets could be found among the crusaders, and many of these poets wrote lyrics about the events they witnessed and the experiences they had. But what do their accounts represent? It has yet to be asked how such courtly texts for a literate, elite audience might reflect the tensions of a new penitential culture and the crusade movement: tensions among, on the one hand, the idea of a penitential Holy War and changes in devotional lay practices, and on the other, secular ideals of chivalry and love. Through a comparative study of verse from different vernacular traditions (Old Occitan, Old French, Middle High German, Italian) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, we can discern multiple perspectives about crusade that resist the complete repentance and rejection of earthly cares that the Church required, what I call a “courtly crusade idiom.” The second way of making communities is aesthetic and diachronic: with an understanding of medieval verse as the conjoining of music and words, modern poets produce newness through the constraints of medieval verse forms such as the troubadour alba and sestina. I call this the paradoxical process of “unthought medievalisms”: inhabiting form through the practice of translation incites anachronistic otherness, reproducing medieval lyric anew rather than rendering it archaic. I take poems by Pound, Creeley, Baraka, Merwin, de Campos and Mayers as experimentations in media, syntax, and pronounced musical idioms that emulate the substantive, performative nature of medieval lyric.

 Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Dimitri Gutas, Yale University

"The Leaven of Translation: From Religious Pluralism to Cultural Concordance in the Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean"

Thursday, March 29, 5:00pm

Wilson Hall 142

Friends of Classics Lecture

Michael Dirda

“THE GREAT GOD PAN in Modern Supernatural Fiction"

Tuesday, March 27, 5:00pm 

Minor Hall 125

Albrecht Diem, Syracuse University

"Hildemar's Queer Anxieties: Carolingian Monastic Reform and Same-Sex Sexuality"

Thursday, March 22, 5:30pm

Campbel 153

reception to follow

***cancelled***  

Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Shatha Almutawa, Willamette University

"'Dress Yourself in the Angelic Form': A Tenth-Century Arabic Philosophy of Religion"

Wednesday, March 21, 5:00pm

Gibson Room, Cocke Hall

 Miraculous Images Workshop

Wednesday, March 21, 3:00-7:00pm

Open Grounds, Studio A

 Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Sarah Teets and Justin Greenlee, University of Virginia

Friday, March 2, 12:00noon

Wilson 142

 Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Pierre Bonnechere, Université de Montréal

"Past, Present, and Future: Old and new perspectives in Dodona and other Greek oracles"

Friday, February 23, 12:00noon

Wilson 142

 Yasser Elhariry, Dartmouth College

“Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation and the Postfrancophone Lyric”

Thursday, February 15 , 5:30 pm

Campbell 153

This lecture tells the story of a unique literary and linguistic development: over the past one hundred years and at least since the second French colonial era beginning in 1830, Franco-Arab writers have been denaturing the monolingual fabric of French by drawing on the rich history of classical Arabic literature—the qasida, Sufi lyric, and the muwashshahat. Against the backdrop of the Négritude poets and the era of global decolonization, Yasser Elhariry describes what happens to the francophone lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Countering the hegemony of the novel, and the market-driven desire to publish novels and migration stories in Paris, he draws on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics in order to demonstrate how Arabic literature and Islamic scripture pacifically invade French in the poetry of Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan). Through a series of detailed close readings, he reveals the generic modes at play in translating Arabic poetics into the French-language lyric, and the mechanisms by which poets foreignize French, as they engage in a translational and intertextual relationship with the history and world of Arabic literature. He concludes with the outline of a cross-cultural literary history and rereading of French and francophone literature in relation to the transversal translations and transmissions of classical Arabic poetics. The vision of the postfrancophone founds a new, polyphonic semantics within the French poetic idiolect, with wide-ranging and surprising implications for the study of French and francophone poetry.  It offers a translingual, comparative repositioning of the field of francophone postcolonial studies along a fluid, translational Franco-Arabic axis.

 ***to be rescheduled***

Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Solange Bumbaugh, Catholic University

"Magical Protection: Ethiopian Prayer Scrolls and Egyptian Oracular Amuletic Decrees”

Friday, February 9, 12:00noon

Wilson 142

 Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Talk

Andrew Sorber, University of Virginia

“‘Lord, declare Your words through my mouth:’ Prophetic Authority in Early-Medieval al-Andalus”

Friday, January 26, 12:00noon

Wilson Hall 142

 AIA Kress Lecture

Sethuraman Suresh, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage

"West Meets East: Commerce Between Ancient Rome and South Asia"

Thursday, January 25th, 5:30pm

Campbell Hall 160

The Roman Republic (second-first century B.C.E.) and later, the Roman Empire under Augustus, Tiberius (first century C.E.) and their successors had commercial relations with the kingdoms of South Asia, primarily India and Sri Lanka. These trade links, flourished for around six hundred years and, in due course, extended to diplomatic relations and even cultural interactions. The height of the contacts was, however, unquestionably in the first two centuries C.E. The Romans procured gemstones (chiefly beryl or aquamarine), textiles (silk and cotton), ivory, aromatic woods, spices (primarily pepper and cardamom) and peacocks from South Asia. In return, Rome exported wine as well as metals such as gold, silver, copper and antimony to South Asia. The evidences for these contacts include the limited but significant references to the trade in ancient Greek, Latin, Tamil and Sanskrit literature and the recurrent discoveries of Roman coins, ceramics and a few other types of Roman objects in different parts of India and adjoining regions. The archaeological evidences within Europe are very meager mainly because of the nature of the commerce—most of the trade goods (spices, textiles, ivory, peacocks) reaching Europe were perishable commodities that have not survived for archaeology. 

Based on extensive field research in South Asia and Europe, this lecture unfolds the little-known story of the Rome-South Asia contacts. The presentation takes you on a unique voyage across the places through which the Romans traveled in India and the interesting things—coins, ceramics, sculptures –that they left behind in those sites. 

 UVA Religious Pluralism Lab

Antoine Borrut, University of Maryland

"Astrology and History in Early Islam"

Friday, December 1, 12:00-1:30pm

Wilson Hall 142

**cancelled** Constantine Lecture

Deborah Boedeker, Brown University

"Through Barbarian Eyes: Hellenes as 'Others' in Herodotus"

Thursday, November 16, 5:00pm

Gibson Room, Cocke Hall

UVA Religious Pluralism Lab

Roundtable Workshop

"Religious and Cultural Appropriation, then and now"

Friday, November 10, 3:00-4:30pm

Rouss 223

Lowe Undergraduate Lecture

Sarah Bond, University of Iowa

"Beyond The Wall: Outcasts, Civic Walls, And Architectural Metaphors from Antiquity to Game of Thrones"

Thursday, November 9, 5:00pm

Rouss 410

Corcoran Department of Philosophy Colloquium Series

Robert Pasnau, University of Colorado-Boulder

"Socratic Guises and Epistemic Biases"

Friday, October 27, 4:00pm

Gibson Room, Cocke Hall 

Abstract. It is one of the oldest and most dubious sayings in philosophy: No one does wrong willingly. That old Socratic line, though implausible as a general view about human action, might plausibly be defended in one special domain, that of epistemic agency. But in the real, non-ideal world, people believe what is false all the time, and not just out of pure and innocent ignorance. On the contrary, we are surrounded by a great deal of epistemic injustice. Yet when we turn our attention to why this is so, it turns out that the sources of epistemic injustice are more complex and varied than has been appreciated – so complex as to give rise, in a wide range of very real cases, to a confounding and perhaps irresolvable dilemma over what it is rational to believe. From beginning to end, then, I start with the Socratic argument against willful wrong action, then consider the special epistemic case, and finally apply the lessons learned to epistemic injustice. 

Download the paper HERE.

Distinguished Lecture in Poetry & Poetics

Jonathan Culler, Cornell University

"Theory of the Lyric"

Thursday, October 26, 5:00pm

Nau 101 

"What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Theory of the Lyric reveals the limitations of these two conceptions of the lyric—the older Romantic model and the modern conception that has come to dominate the study of poetry—both of which neglect what is most striking and compelling in the lyric and falsify the long and rich tradition of the lyric in the West. Jonathan Culler explores alternative conceptions offered by this tradition, such as public discourse made authoritative by its rhythmical structures, and he constructs a more capacious model of the lyric that will help readers appreciate its range of possibilities. 

"Theory of the Lyric constitutes a major advance in our understanding of the Western lyric tradition. Examining ancient as well as modern poems, from Sappho to Ashbery, in many European languages, Culler underscores lyric’s surprising continuities across centuries of change—its rhythmical resources, its strange modes of address, its use of the present tense, and the intriguing tension between its ritualistic and fictional dimensions. He defends the idea of lyric as a genre against recent critiques, arguing that lyrics address our world rather than project a fictional world and also challenging the strongly established assumption that poems exist to be interpreted. Theory of the Lyric concludes with a discussion of how to conceive the relations between lyric and society in ways that would acknowledge and respond to lyric’s enduring powers of enchantment." 

UVA Religious Pluralism Lab

Henk Versnel, Leiden University

"Coping with the Gods: Implications and Complications of Greek Polytheism"  [lecture]

Wednesday, October 25, 5:00pm

Gibson Room, Cocke hall

reception to follow.

 Summary: Monolithic, one-sided or universalist claims in the field of Greek (and probably any) theology by their very nature tend to be misleading since they illuminate only part of a complex and kaleidoscopic religious reality. In many respects, for instance the infinite complexity of polytheism or the problems concerning divergent, yet simultaneous, concepts of nature, qualities, and actions of the gods, ancient Greeks  display an alarming capacity to validate two (or more) dissonant, if not contradictory, representations of the divine as being complementary rather than mutually exclusive.

They not only accept the validity of either one in its own right, but also may allow them to co-exist in such a smooth and seemingly unreflected manner that it often shocks the modern mind. This position constitutes both their similarity and their difference as compared to the modern reader, who recognizes the seduction of smoothing over logical dissonances, but is not able to really live with it.

All this will be illustrated through a discussion of three issues:

I MANY GODS: SAME OR OTHER, CHAOS OR KOSMOS?

II THE GODS: JUST OR ARBITRARY?

III INDIVIDUAL GODS: POWERFUL OR ALL-POWERFUL?

AIA Bass Lecture

Rebecca Ingram, Institute of Nautical Archaeology

“Below the Streets of Istanbul: Urban Archaeology and Medieval Shipwrecks at Yenikapi”

Tuesday, October 24th, 5:30pm

Campbell 160

UVA Religious Pluralism Lab

Andrej Petrovic, University of Virginia

"Henk Versnel and historiographies of Greek Religion" [seminar talk]

Wednesday, October 11, 12:00-1:30pm

Gibson Room, Cocke Hall

 UVA Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab

Jessica Andruss, University of Virginia

"'O Israel, repent and return!': Arabic Preaching in Medieval Jewish Discourse" [seminar talk]

Friday, September 29, 12:00-1:30pm

Wilson Hall 142

Time and Eternity -Time in Archaic Greek Literature Conference

September 22-24

Time is a concept central to human existence, and all forms of verbal and narrative art present or reconfigure events that occur in time. Time can also be an objective natural measure, but in literature it appears malleable and can be shaped according to the needs of the moment. In addition, time can be perceived in many ways as linear, circular, or kairos; it can also be refracted through human and divine temporalities. Reflections on time begin in the archaic age when the Greeks composed literature that explored the representation and ordering of time. Our conference sets out to examine how time functions in archaic texts and what those texts can tell us about ideas and conceptions of time in early Greece.

 Please visit our website at http://classics.virginia.edu/conference-time-and-eternity-conception-time-archaic-greek-literature.

 For further information, please contact Matthew Pincus at mbp3cf@virginia.edu.

Dissecting Cultural Pluralism Lab Launch Reception

Friday, September 8, 4:00pm

Wilson Hall 142 

Corcoran Department of Philosophy’s 2017/18 Colloquia Series

John Armstrong, Southern Virginia University

"The Striving Parts of Plato's Universe"

Friday, September 1, 4:00pm

Gibson Room, Cocke Hall

In Plato’s Laws, the Athenian Stranger says that the universe’s parts, which include human beings, come to be and “strive” for the sake of the universe as a whole. This implies two kinds of holism: rational holism, the view that the ultimate justification of a part’s activity is its contribution to the good of the universe as a whole; and motivational holism, the view that the universe’s parts are motivated to contribute to the good of the universe as a whole. If Plato is a holist in these senses, then we should modify the common assumption that Plato is an egoist of either the rational or the psychological sort. I argue that Plato is both a rational and a motivational holist in the Laws and that his holism arises from a teleological conception of the universe similar to Aristotle’s.