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Lauren Curtis, Director, Classical Studies, Associate Professor of Classics, Bard College
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This presentation tackles how scholars of literature can approach historical archives, using the Roman poet Ovid as an example. Exiled to the northeastern frontier of the Roman empire (modern Romania) by the emperor Augustus in 8 CE, Ovid continued to write deeply personal poetry to friends and a wider reading public. Scholars have long noticed how his poetry is transformed by the experience of exile; this presentation argues that if we put his work in dialogue with the surviving written archives from the Roman frontier (military and diplomatic documents, for example, inscribed on wax, bronze, and stone), we see that not just his themes but also his very language is transformed by local written culture.Curtis will discuss how the traditional siloing of academic disciplines and subfields can occlude such connections, and argue that attempting to bridge them can result in new approaches to (ancient) literature.