News and Events

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

Jenny Strauss Clay, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of Virginia
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
The fifth book of the Odyssey—the first to focus exclusively on the epic’s hero—may in some sense be considered the beginning of the epic proper. Its action constitutes a coherent arc that takes the hero from his captivity on Calypso’s island to the land of the Phaeacians, who will bring him back at last to Ithaca. But in addition to its narrative unity, Book 5 possesses a significant thematic unity, one centering on the issue of mortality and immortality. Although the stage is set by il gran rifituto—Odysseus’ refusal of Calypso’s offer of immortality and his choice to return to Ithaca—the tension between the divine and human in fact permeates the book in ways both obvious and subtle. Calypso’s love for the mortal Odysseus, Hermes’ distaste for his mission, Poseidon’s fury, and the aid of Leocothea, who once was mortal but is now immortal, all ring the changes on the possibilities for, and tensions inherent in, divine-human interactions. They also serve to position the Odyssey at a pivotal moment in the relations between gods and mortals: their previous intimacy is waning, and apotheosis belongs to a bygone era. This central theme not only dominates Book Five from beginning to end, but it offers a framework for the whole poem.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  11:00 am – 12:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Language tables are held at Kline and entail about an hour of casual discussion during meal times, where students interested in a language get to know each other and practice colloquial conversations. They are held by the tutor of the language, and although sometimes professors join the table, it is a very low-stakes and fun setting to immerse yourself in a language, its culture and the foreign language community at Bard.

Poetry, Politics, and Religion in Post-Roman Iberia
Olin 102 (Friday) & Blithewood (Saturday)  At the center of our workshop is an icon of Visigothic literary culture, and one of the most prolific Latin poets of the post-Roman world: Eugenius of Toledo, bishop of the Visigothic urbs regia from 646-657 CE. Despite the acknowledged richness of Eugenius’s material—spanning epigraphic, liturgical, lyrical, and epistolary genres, and including a vast pseudepigraphic corpus—his writings remain underused by historians, and there has never been a monographic study of his work.

This conference and subsequent volume aim to invigorate conversation surrounding the poet-bishop, building off a soon-to-be-published translation of his complete works (Routledge), the first ever into English, by Graham Barrett and David Ungvary, as well as Paulo Farmhouse Alberto’s foundational Corpus Christianorum edition (2005). Taking inspiration from more recent work in late antique literary history, which has revalorized Late Latin poetry as a profoundly social discourse, we seek to develop approaches to Eugenius that are sensitive to the interplay between his sophisticated poetics and his cultural and political contexts. In this way, we hope to gain a better understanding of how Eugenius’s distinctive literary practice interacted with the evolving institutions of power, religious environments, and literary communities of Visigothic Iberia. Together, we wish to discover more about how Eugenius functioned socially as a clerical poet in this world; how he leveraged his writing practice in moves for political power; and how Eugenius’s legacy may have reshaped the cultural landscape of Latin poetry in the post-Roman West.
PROGRAMFriday, September 8
Olin Humanities Building
Room 1029:30-10AM
WELCOME&COFFEE

10-10:30AM
INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATING AND INTERPRETING EUGENIUS OF TOLEDO

Graham Barrett
University of Lincoln, UK

David Ungvary
Bard College

1:30-2:30PM
KEYNOTE: THE POETIC LANDSCAPES OF LATE LATIN ANTIQUITY

Joseph Pucci
Brown University

10:45AM-12:15PM
SESSION 1: SITUATING THE BISHOP: EUGENIUS’S RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL WORLD

Jamie Wood
University of Lincoln, UK
“From Zaragoza to Toledo: Eugenius in ecclesiastical and royal context”

Eleonora Dell’ Elicine
Universidad de Buenos Aires/Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento/ UCEL
“Guarding Orthodoxy: Eugenius of Toledo and the theological debate of his time”

12:15-1:30PM
BREAK & LUNCH

2:45-4:15PM
SESSION 2: FRAMING THE POET: EUGENIUS’S LITERARY WORLD

Paulo Farmhouse Alberto
University of Lisbon
“Eugenius of Toledo and grammatical teaching in the Early Middle Ages”

Cillian O’Hogan
University of Toronto
“Il miglior fabbro? Eugenius as a reader and editor of Dracontius”
 SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
BLITHEWOOD8:30-9AM
COFFEE & BREAKFAST

9:00AM-12:15PM
SESSION 3: READING EUGENIUS

Mark Tizzoni
Bates College
“Eugenius and Educational Culture”

Céline Urlacher-Becht
University of Haute-Alsace
 “Eugenius towards late Latin epigram”

Dennis Trout
University of Missouri
 “Eugenius’s “Epigraphic” Poetry: Contents and Context”

Annemarie Pilarski
University of Regensburg
“Curses, laments, and compunction: Handling Death through Poetry in Eugenius' Libellus carminum and in the Epitaphion Antoninae”

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  3:30 pm – 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us on Friday, May 19 at 3:30 pm in RKC 103 for the presentation of the latest issue of Sui Generis, Bard’s student-run journal dedicated to literary translation. Please come to celebrate the hard work of the journal’s editorial board and the many translators who contributed to a robust and diverse issue of the journal. In addition to readings of work in many languages and in English translation, there will be light refreshments. All are welcome!

David Rosenbloom, University of Maryland
Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Characterized in antiquity as ‘brimming with Ares’, the Greek god of war, Aeschylus’ tragedy Seven against Thebes dramatizes the ultimately successful defense of the Thebes against a savage band of Argive invaders. This talk explores the major features of the play: its place as the final tragedy in a tetralogy that included Laius, Oedipus, and the satyr play Sphinx; its emphasis on the antithesis and analogy between family and city; its mixed plot in which city is saved but the lineage of Laius annihilated in the mutual fratricide of the accursed sons of Oedipus, Eteocles, and Polyneices. The special focus of the talk is the central theme of play and the entire trilogy: attempts to circumvent fate that, far from avoiding the unwanted future, ensure its realization.

No prior knowledge of the play is needed.

Russian-Ukrainian war
Olin Humanities, Room 203  12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This teach-in will not only uncover some histories of Russian oppression and colonial domination within Ukrainian context, but will also include a panel discussion where students from other post-soviet countries will share their experience with Russification and how it affects their daily life.

Since the event is during lunch time, a free meal and drinks will be provided.

Looking forward to seeing you on Friday, April 7 in Olin 203!

RSVP

Graham Barrett, University of Lincoln, UK 
David Ungvary, Bard College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
“Be present to us, You Holy One, loosen the muscles of our throats,
fill our mouths with articulate phrases, fill our hearts with tears…”
 
“Blubbery fat on his neck chokes off his pudgy gullet
and his horribly raspy voice loses its dulcet tones.”
 
These starkly different couplets were composed during the so-called “Dark Ages” by the same Latin poet: Eugenius of Toledo (d. 657 CE). Maybe. In this workshop, Professors Graham Barrett (University of Lincoln, UK) and David Ungvary (Bard) will expose participants to the challenges of locating an authentic “voice” in Eugenius’s verse, which has never before been rendered into English, but which, in the Middle Ages, was popular enough to inspire a host of imitators and pseudo-Eugenian posers. Together, those in the workshop will explore—partly through experiments in re-writing Eugenius—how various modes of translation may help (or hinder) attempts to find and animate the “true Eugenius,” a poet whose tone can range wildly from pious and reverent to just plain mean. All students and faculty interested in translation are encouraged to attend; no knowledge of Latin is necessary.