News and Events

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
In the middle of the twentieth century, renowned dancer and choreographer, Martha Graham, and sculptor and set designer, Isamu Noguchi, collaborated on a group of dances based on Greek myth. Professor Ancona’s book, Martha Graham’s Greek Myth-Based Dances and Her Collaboration with Isamu Noguchi (Bloomsbury Academic 2026), explores their work together as performance artist and visual artist, arguing that the bold and woman-centered receptions of Greek myth created by Graham emerged from a mutual understanding of space and movement / objects and bodies. Her talk will discuss material from the book, including some of the challenges and opportunities for a Classics scholar writing about modern dance and modern art. The talk will be illustrated with still images and video.

Olin Humanities, Room 205  3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Come join us to discuss Oppian’s On Fishing, an epic poem in five books about the wonders of the ocean, human ingenuity, and the dominion of (the fisher)man over the creatures of the sea­­—from the clever octopus to the fearsome tunny. This seminar with scholars from across North America is free and open to the Bard Community. Anglers, experts, and novices are welcome. Please email [email protected] for more information and access to the text.

Professor Daniel Newsome, Bard Mathematics program
Olin Humanities, Room 201  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
"The Myth of Er," located late in Chapter X of Plato's Republic, introduced much of the world to the idea of a musically motivated cosmos. In his Timaeus a bit more detail is given on how this harmonic world was constructed. The description is extremely evocative but like a dream, when you wake up, things don't always fit together. For the next 2000+ years astronomers, astrologers, philosophers, mathematicians, musicians, and music theorists tried to get the universe to fit into some sort of harmonic scheme. This is their story.

With James Romm and Lauren Curtis
Olin Humanities, Room 202  7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Join us for a screening of the documentary film Army of Lovers (50 minutes), the story of the elite Theban army corps made up of male couples, followed by a discussion of same-sex relations in the ancient world led by Classics professors James Romm and Lauren Curtis.

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.