News and Events

Olin Language Center  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Meet faculty, students, and staff, learn about new courses, explore study abroad opportunities, and enjoy food and drink at the FLCL Open House!

  New Annandale House  12:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) meets for lab time every Friday at New Annandale House. Those interested in digital humanities or archiving are welcome to stop by any time between 12 and 4 pm.

  New Annandale House  12:00 pm – 4:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) meets for lab time every Friday at New Annandale House. Those interested in digital humanities or archiving are welcome to stop by any time between 12 and 4 pm.

Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:30 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk reflects on the increasing presence of Greco-Roman receptions in a global popular culture industry based in South Korea, commonly referred to as K-pop. After providing an overview of key Greco-Roman themes in K-pop, this discussion delves into the reception of Cupid and Psyche in the girl group NewJeans’ 2023 song “Cool with You.” Drawing on the original context of the story as presented by the 2nd-century Roman author Apuleius and its connection to Roman pantomime dance, the talk explores how the reception of Cupid and Psyche functions as a meta-commentary on interracial romance, mediated through the lens of social media, in K-pop.

Dr. Ute Wartenberg Kagan, President
American Numismatic Society
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
An introduction to Greek coinage and currency, designed for beginners in the field.  An opportunity to explore this most tangible of Greek art forms (and you will get to touch some examples!)

Prof. Del Maticic, Blegen Fellow in Greek and Roman Studies, Vassar College
Olin Humanities, Room 202  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Metals are everywhere in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and they have been interpreted widely for their mythical, poetological, and historical significance. In this talk, I will suggest a more general theory about what metal means in Ovid's metamorphic world. In particular, I argue that Ovid returns again and again to metal's function as a connector and mediator. As monetary currencies, technologies of war, markers of temporal periodization, and medium through which gods mix with mortals, metals magnetize an ecology of relation around them in the world of the poem, conducting connectivities of all kinds. This force of metallic mixture is occasionally a source of positive outcomes for characters in the poem, but much more often is a force of deterioration and violence. In this way, metal's agential power in the Ovidian world is as something of an agent of Heraclitean strife, binding the world together in tension.

Rob Cioffi, Chuck Doran, and Jay Elliott
Stevenson Library 4th Floor Reading Room  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
On the afternoon of August 24th, 79 CE, an unusual cloud in the shape of a pine tree could be seen across the Bay of Naples. As night turned to dawn on the morning of the 25th, Mt. Vesuvius was erupting with lethal force: buildings shook violently, the sea was absorbed back into itself, and black clouds rent by fire coursed through the sky. The eruption buried cities, killed tens of thousands, and terrified countless others. Yet, Vesuvius’ destruction was also, paradoxically, responsible for stunning acts of preservation. In Pompeii, the volcanic ash created a time capsule of Roman life in 79 CE, and in Herculaneum the deadly, hot gas preserved a whole library: nearly 1,000 ancient Greek and Latin book rolls that had been carbonized during the eruption. The only problem has been reading them. For 250 years scholars have tried to unravel the Herculaneum texts with varying degrees of success—and substantial loss of material. 

On the morning of February 5th, 2024 CE, all that changed. The Vesuvius Challenge announced three winners, who, thanks to advanced imaging technologies and artificial intelligence, have used a non-destructive process to read a significant portion of a new Herculaneum text. It is very likely by the epicurean philosopher Philodemus. Their discovery has the potential to change the landscape of Greek literature. It has already become major news and has featured in stories on NPR and in the Guardian. This informal seminar will present these findings to the Bard community, lay out their groundbreaking significance for anyone interested in Greek literature and ancient philosophy, and discuss their potential further applications.

  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 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.
 

Tim Whitmarsh, University of Cambridge
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Narratives take place in space and time. This talk considers how the revolutions in road networking in the time of the Emperor Augustus had decisive effects on the development of two new literary forms: one is the novel, and the other will be revealed on the day.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

Carolyn Dewald (Bard) with James Romm (Bard) and Rachel Friedman (Vassar)
Hegeman 204A  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EST/GMT-5
There are few authors more central to Greek history than Herodotus, whose nine books of Histories (literally, Investigations) set out not only to describe the conflict between Greece and the Persian empire but also to discover its origins. And there are few scholars whose work has been more central to our understanding of Herodotus than Carolyn Dewald, whose commentary on Book 1 of the Histories (co-authored with Rosaria Munson) has just been published. Professor Dewald has been working on this commentary since she arrived at Bard (2003-4) and is delighted to have finally finished it. She still finds him (aka the "Father of History") amazing and will be equally delighted to discuss how remarkable Herodotus is with all of you who have time to come and take part in the conversation. Professor Dewald will be joined by James Romm of Bard’s Classical Studies Program and Rachel Friedman of Vassar.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

Andrew Gregory, University College London
Hegeman 204  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Plato's use of number in his music theory, theory of matter, and cosmology raises some interesting questions in metaphysics and philosophy of science. What is the relation between mathematics, physics, and the world? Is there a beauty and simplicity to some mathematics and does that capture the nature of the world? What is the distinction (historical, philosophical) between mathematical physics and numerology? This paper looks at the nature and influence of Plato's views.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

Sarah Ruden, University of Pennsylvania
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Celebrated and award-winning translator of ancient literature, Sarah Ruden, discusses her work on two authors from Roman North Africa: the "novelist" Apuleius and the "autobiographer" St. Augustine. The talk explores how the art of translation illuminates surprising overlap between apparently disparate texts: one farcical and irreverent, the other pious and philosophical.

Campus Center, Weis Cinema  6:00 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Tuesday, October 18 at 6 pm in Weis Cinema, Gwenda-lin Grewal will give a talk on her book Fashion / Sense.

Fashion / Sense seeks to explode fashion, and with it, the stigma in philosophy against fashion’s superficiality. Using primarily ancient Greek texts, alongside allusions to fashion and pop culture, Grewal examines the rift between fashion and philosophy, and challenges the claim that fashion is modern. Fashion’s quarrel with philosophy may be as ancient as that infamous quarrel between philosophy and poetry. And the quest for fashion’s origins—for a neutrally-outfitted self, stripped of the self-awareness that comes with thinking—prompts deeper questions about human agency and time. In the silhouettes of clothes and words, fashion emerges as perhaps philosophy’s most underestimated doppelgänger.

Introduced by writer and Bard College faculty member Benjamin Hale, and followed by a Q&A.

Gwenda-lin Grewal is currently the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language at the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy and Fashion (Bloomsbury, 2022), Thinking of Death in Plato’s Euthydemus: A Close Reading and New Translation (Oxford University Press, 2022), an edited volume of essays on “(Mis)quotations in Plato” (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2022), and English translations of Plato’s Phaedo (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018) and Plato’s Cratylus (New Alexandria, forthcoming). Her awards include the Blegen Research Fellowship (Vassar College) and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship (Yale University).

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (Twelve, 2011) and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2016).  He has received the Bard Fiction Prize, a Michener-Copernicus Award, and nominations for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. His writing has appeared, among other places, in Conjunctions, Harper's Magazine, the Paris Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like.
Kline, College Room  1:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  A Conversation
11:50 am – 1:10 pm EDT/GMT-4
Dance is one of the oldest known art forms but also one of the most evanescent. How do we study dance in premodern cultures like ancient Greece and Rome? What questions can we ask, what sources are available to us, and what methodologies do we employ? How can scholars and practitioners create a more fruitful and creative dialogue between past and present in Dance Studies?

Please join Lauren Curtis (Bard College) and Karin Schlapbach (University of Fribourg), two members of the international research project IDA (Imprints of Ancient Dance / Improntas de danza antigua) to discuss their work in a roundtable conversation hosted by the Dance Program and Classical Studies Program.

Olin Language Center, Upper Lobby  1:00 pm – 2:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Grab some home-made treats, celebrate the end of the semester, and learn about courses for the next term.

All are welcome!

Don't forget to wear your mask.

 

Marcus Folch, Columbia University
Online Event  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Many of the most famous people from the ancient Greco-Roman world are said to have been imprisoned: Socrates, Demosthenes, John the Baptist, Jesus, Saints Paul, Peter, and Perpetua, to name just a few. How did ancient prisons work? Were they like prisons today? What were they used for? And what do we learn about ancient—and modern—societies by studying prisons in classical Greece and Rome? This talk attempts to answer some of these questions by focusing on ancient prison narratives from Greece, Rome, and Egypt. This event is part of the Common Course, The Making of Citizenship: Local, National, Global.

Join Zoom Meeting:  https://bard.zoom.us/j/83090401030?pwd=a1RPeXFXM21NWkt4UlVOUTVuNDcyZz09  
Meeting ID: 830 9040 1030      Passcode: 626896

Ludlow Tent  5:40 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join us for our Literature Program Open House. The Open House will be an opportunity to meet Literature faculty, hear about next semester's courses, talk with Literature seniors and other students about their experiences, and celebrate the semester as a community.

Everyone -- whether or not you've already taken a course in Literature -- is welcome!

Richard is retiring. We are gathering to celebrate!
5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Curtis Dozier, Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies,Vassar College
Olin Language Center Room 118  6:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Curtis Dozier (Vassar College) will speak about his webpage Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics (@pharosclassics), where he documents and responds to appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by contemporary hate groups. These include both high-profile examples, such as Spartan helmets worn by those who attacked the US Capitol in January 2021, and a whole (mostly online) world of what has been termed "highbrow white nationalism." These latter groups, in particular, pose a particular challenge to the discipline of Classics because, unlike the superficial engagement with antiquity of the Capitol rioters, the appropriations practiced by the thought leaders of white ethnonationalism reflect a deep understanding of the violence inherent in ancient social and political practices and of the ways that the prestige of the ancient world has been, and in the present, can be harnessed rhetorically to legitimize racist and oppressive politics. Dessert to go will be provided!

A Talk with John Bracey
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Do we want to make our Classics programs inclusive and welcoming to everyone? Do we want our programs to represent the full demographics of our schools? Do we want our field to grow larger and more diverse? I can show you exactly how to make that happen. Come and learn how to kick the doors of Classics wide open and let everyone inside. Change is possible, if we are willing to do what it takes.

Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/7160320404 

Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.
 

Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
I was born in Sài Gòn Việt Nam, my family fled to America in 1975, and I grew up in Carlisle PA. Reared on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, John Hughes, Star Wars, Bones Brigade videos, and bootlegged cassettes of Minor Threat and TSOL, I graduated high school in 1991. I majored in Classical Languages and Literature at Bard College—how did no one talk me out of that?—got my Master’s Degree at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and then moved to New York City in 1997.  There I apprenticed to be a tattooer while teaching Latin during the day, and I’ve been teaching and tattooing ever since.  I’ve never been good at staying in one lane—ask my wife about my driving.

Following in the footsteps of E.B. White (who was neither a tattooer nor Latin teacher), my wife and I left the city and moved to Maine in 2003 (she’s an honest-to-goodness Mainer) where we opened our shop, Tsunami Tattoo.  

In 2012, I delivered a TEDx talk which was highlighted by NPR’s TED Radio Hour.  The TEDx talk and its reception planted a seed in me for sharing more of my story as a refugee (of which I’d shared very little). I embarked on writing my memoir in 2016, and in April 2020 SIGH, GONE was published by Flatiron Books. You can read the memoir to get all the gory details of my childhood and adolescence, but spoiler alert:  I do somehow survive.

And here I am at present, deeply grateful to be following this brambly path to its unknown destination.  

As Joe Strummer said, the future is unwritten.

Zoom Link: https://bard.zoom.us/j/87931638633?pwd=Y3FJQ1VydHhJVjA0VE4xUVpwbHMvZz09

Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

Collecta in Classicis: Together in Classics Talk with Donna Zuckerberg, author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age
Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In 2015, Donna Zuckerberg founded the online Classics publication Eidolon as “a modern way to write about the ancient world” and put out a call for essays that had “a strong authorial voice and a unique point of view.” But she didn’t yet realize how political that vision was, or how radical it could be. In this talk, Dr. Zuckerberg traces the history of Eidolon and describes the challenges she and her team faced in making intersectional feminism central to the publication’s mission in the five years before it closed in late 2020.

Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

https://bard.zoom.us/j/89382774634?pwd=eW5aTnczdndPektCNkUxVm5td2FSUT09

Meeting ID: 893 8277 4634
Passcode: 597023

Bard Hall  1:30 pm – 2:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
On Wednesday, March 17, the Bard College History Club will have Professors Rob Cioffi and David Ungvary of the Classics Program lecture on plagues in Greco-Roman antiquity. Please contact Kent Zheng ([email protected]) to receive the recommended readings prior to attendance.

Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

The third panel will be led by Hannah Silverblank, scholar of Ancient Disability Haverford College.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

Zoom Link | Meeting ID: 863 8461 3896 | Passcode: 407309

A Talk with Hannah Silverblank (Haverford College)
Online Event  4:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
In both ancient Greek and English, the language of disability is notoriously fraught with ideological assumptions about the wide variety of human bodies, minds, and ways of being. In the first half of this talk, Hannah Silverblank (Haverford College) will discuss the generative example of a Homeric adjective used to describe the god Hephaistos: the epithet ἀμφιγυήεις (amphi-gu-ē-eis). Does the word really mean ‘with both feet crooked, lame’, as the standard Greek-English lexicon (LSJ) would indicate? What are readers to make of the inconsistency that translators have brought this word into English, from ‘of the two lame legs’ (Murray 1924), to ‘strong-handed’ (Lattimore 1951) to ‘the… crook-legged god’ (Alexander 2015)? How do English translations of Homer’s Iliad grapple with the uncertainty of the word’s meaning, and, by extension, the meaning of Hephaistos’ embodiment? Together we will discuss the ways in which ableist assumptions of lexicographers and translators have coded and distorted Greek representations of the smith god and his disability, with ideological consequences that spill out beyond the lexicon and the Iliad. 

The second half of the talk will take the form of a speculative dialogue between the speaker and the audience. How do we think about the role of the dictionary in our Classical Studies courses? How might students and faculty search for meaning in ancient languages through and beyond the lexicon? What forms of experiential and linguistic knowledges are assumed or privileged in our Greek-English lexica, and which are repressed or excluded? How does the epistemological potential of the lexicon inform and shape the kinds of meaning and interpretation derived from studies of the ancient Mediterranean? How can we — together, or collecta, in Classics — collaborate to forge new, sharper tools of wordsmithy?

Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

This talk will feature Hannah Silverblank, scholar of ancient disability Haverford College.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/88494009839?pwd=YjNzV2REZjdDZmhXZU5HQVFPeXV1QT09

Meeting ID: 884 9400 9839
Passcode: 673105

Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

In this interactive talk, Prof. Clara Bosak-Schoeder (she/they) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will discuss how the ableism of academia is exacerbated by the elitist culture of premodern disciplines and what CripAntiquity is doing to make ancient studies more accessible to all.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/85163555574?pwd=RU51bDJEbjdLdmhuNkpYczJYSEVNdz09

Meeting ID: 851 6355 5574
Passcode: 602667

Online Event  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Collecta in Classicis : “Together in Classics,” will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

The second panel led by Clara Bosak-Schoeder, University of Illinois, founder of CripAntiquity, discusses an international advocacy organization for disabled and neurodiverse students, teachers, scholars, staff, artists, and writers in ancient studies.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.

Zoom Link | Meeting ID: 863 8461 3896 | Passcode: 407309

Online Event  2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EST/GMT-5
How do we build more inclusive communities in Classics? How do we do Classics with joy and cultivate “belonging” with a sense of integrity and purpose? What are the opportunities and challenges for our field?  This roundtable discussion is the opening event in our spring series, Collecta in Classicis / Together in Classics, hosted by the students and faculty of the Classical Studies program and supported by the Dean of the College’s Inclusion Challenge. 

Roundtable speakers: 

Bethany Hucks is a fourth-year PhD student at Heidelberg University in Germany, researching Egyptian influence on art and identity in imperial Rome. She has a background in biochemistry, museums, and marketing and spends her summers working on pottery at various archaeological excavations. In her free time, she works on aiding marginalized scholars and increasing/retaining diversity in ancient world studies and archaeology.
 Suzanne Lye is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She received her AB from Harvard University, where she studied organic chemistry and the history of antibiotics. After receiving her PhD in Classics from the University of California, Los Angeles, she was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Her first book project focuses on conceptions of the afterlife in ancient Greek Underworld narratives from Homer to Lucian. Her next project will focus on women’s anger in ancient literature and magic. She has published on ancient epic, ancient magic and religion, ancient representations of gender and ethnicity, ancient and modern pedagogy, and Classical reception. Additionally, she has contributed to several digital humanities initiatives through Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, including the Homer Multitext Project, and is co-chair of the steering committee for the Women’s Classical Caucus.

Nandini Pandey is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, trained in Classics and English at Swarthmore, Oxford, Cambridge, and Berkeley. She joins us from Germany, where she is writing a second book on Roman diversity thanks to a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Her first book, The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome (Cambridge, 2018), won the 2020 CAMWS First Book Prize, and she has written numerous pieces for Eidolon as well as traditional classics journals.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/86384613896?pwd=N0tESnhlWFNINzVuam44N1k4dWxJUT09

Meeting ID: 863 8461 3896
Passcode: 407309

This event is part of the Collecta in Classicis: Together in Classics series.

Collecta in Classicis : Together in Classics will provide a space for scholars, teachers, and students to have a conversation about inclusivity in Classics, what that means, what it looks like, and why Classics is not always inclusive. We welcome scholars who have engaged critically with diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and more as it relates to their experience in the field of Classics, or in their study of the Classical World, or both. Furthermore, we hope to include voices of marginalized groups typically silenced either in the past, or even today, by the Classics. How we make Classics more inclusive and accessible, and what that means and looks like, are difficult questions. We hope to encourage productive dialogues that contribute, in individual steps, to the transformative work needed in order for the field of Classics to be reimagined.

*A note on the name: The Latin title is representative of Classics, and having the words declined in the neuter, accusative, plural is representative of the inclusivity. The neuter excludes neither men nor women, while also including people identifying outside of masculine or feminine binaries. The plural is—quite literally—denoting that Classics is for and made up of all people.
 

  Website  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Especially relevant for those moderating into Classical Studies, currently taking an upper-level seminar, or embarking upon a senior project next year. But any student with an interest in Classics, at any stage and any level, is welcome. 

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. 
Kline, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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.

Sarah Symons, Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Science, McMaster University, Ontario
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk will describe some of the archeological evidence for astronomical knowledge in ancient Egypt and discuss the challenges of understanding (up to) 4,500-year-old texts, objects, and monuments. What did the ancient Egyptians know about astronomy? To what uses did they put this knowledge? And how much can we learn from a fragmentary archeological record?
 
Sarah Symons is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Science, McMaster University, Ontario. She studies the history of astronomy in ancient Egypt, with particular interests in timekeeping and astronomical maps, and is also director of the William J. McCallion Planetarium in Hamilton, Ontario. She is coeditor (with Bard’s Kassandra Miller) of Down to the Hour, a recently published book on ancient and classical timekeeping.


 

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. 
Kline, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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.

Charles Stang, Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:15 pm EST/GMT-5
How did the ancient Greeks and Romans conceive of the nature of the human subject and its relationship to the divine?

The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (203-270 CE) famously insisted that every human is doubled: our intellect “here” in the material world has an archetype “there” in a transcendent reality, where it eternally feasts on the intelligible Forms. This lecture will explore how Plotinus’s model of doubled selfhood fared in the generation that followed immediately upon his death, particularly in a debate between two of his most important Neoplatonic successors, Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234 – c. 305) and Iamblichus of Chalcis (c. 245 – c. 325). Specifically, it will explore the implications of this model of selfhood for ritual practice, that is, for the traditional worship of the gods.
 

  Please join us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. 
Kline, President's Room  12:00 pm – 2:00 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.

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
A Conversation With:

Carolyn Dewald, Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies
Chiara Ricciardone, Hannah Arendt Center Teaching Fellow
James Romm, Professor of Classics

Reflections on how the Greeks, inventors of democracy, lost that system of government and reverted to monarchy, and how their experience may help us understand the current political moment.

Free and open to the public!

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

  120; Olin Language Center  8:00 pm – 9:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Latin Study Room is open to beginning and intermediate Latin students to work on their homework in a friendly setting, to do extra practice together, and to ask questions of the tutors, who will be on hand to help out. Please feel free to join! 
 

Mary Norris, American author, writer, and copy editor for the New Yorker
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
More than a dozen works about Greece and Greek, modern and ancient, by translators, memoirists, novelists, scholars, essayists, lecturers, dramatists, and actors from England, America, Australia, Greece, and Italy have been published in just the past two years, and there are more in the works. The author of Greek to Me will celebrate recent work inspired by the language, literature, and landscape of Greece and inquire into whatever it is in our current situation that sends us back to the Greeks.

  Demetra Kasimis
Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Does Plato’s Republic enact a conspiracy? Ostensibly, the impetus for imagining a political regime radically different from the democracy of the discussion is a desire to illustrate a concept (justice), not to overthrow a real political order. On second glance, the Republic takes place during the Peloponnesian War, when conspiratorial zeal consumed Athens. Fears of secret power and political instability erupt into and shape the stylistics of the narrative, provoking doubt about what the dialogue claims it is doing and proposing. Whether we are made privy to a conversation about a political world that may never exist or exposed to a strategy for discussing revolution undetected remains unresolved. The Republic invites a hermeneutics of suspicion, drawing us into a democratic culture of mistrust and the seductions of conspiratorial thinking. As it tropes conspiracy, the Republic provides a searching, immanent, and still-relevant critique of a democracy undergoing what we might today call authoritarian drift. 

Blithewood  1:00 pm – 2:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
An Athenian tragedy performed on the Blithewood Manor porch.

Blithewood  7:00 pm – 8:15 pm EDT/GMT-4
An Athenian tragedy performed on the Blithewood Manor porch at sunset on Friday and Saturday, May 3 and 4. Additional performance at 1:00 pm on Sunday, May 5.

Catherine Conybeare, Professor of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies, Bryn Mawr College
Olin Humanities, Room 102  4:45 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The writings of Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) are fundamental to the Western European intellectual tradition. It is rarely taken into account, however, that he spent almost his entire life in North Africa. This talk will consider what the late Roman Empire looked like from the “eccentric” vantage points of Numidia and Africa Proconsularis—Algeria and Tunisia, in contemporary terms—and what effect that eccentricity may have had on Augustine’s thought.

Carolyn Dewald, Professor Emerita of History and Classics, Bard College
Olin Humanities, Room 202  6:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Please join the Department of Classics

by Poet/Translator A. E. Stallings
Campus Center, Weis Cinema  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
A. E. Stallings is an American poet who studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published three collections of poetry—Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives—and a verse translation (in rhyming fourteeners!) of Lucretius, The Nature of Things. She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from United States Artists, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Stallings speaks and lectures widely on a variety of topics, and has been a regular faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference and the Sewanee Summer Writers’ Conference. Having studied in Athens, Georgia, she now lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos, and their two argonauts, Jason and Atalanta.

Jon K. Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma
RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This lecture will explore the ways in which the natural sciences, particularly paleogenomics, are providing us exciting new insights into important questions about the ancient past such as the fall of Rome. And it will consider how the study of human history can deepen our understanding of health, disease, and the evolution of pathogens like smallpox and plague.

Sarah Olsen, Assistant Professor of Classics at Williams College
RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
This talk compares Euripides’s Ion (ca. 413 BCE) with Fredrick Ashton’s ballet Cinderella (1948), arguing that in both productions, dance serves to foreshadow the titular character’s transformation from rags to royalty. I will further demonstrate that Euripides’s play, in sharp contrast to Ashton’s playful ballet, exploits the ambivalent status of solo dance in the ancient Greek cultural imagination to underscore the tragedy of Ion’s transformation, using the language and imagery of movement to unsettle our assumptions about both Ion and his mother, Creusa.

Michael Weinman, Professor of Philosophy, Bard College Berlin
RKC 103  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Drawing on arguments from The Parthenon and Liberal Education (SUNY, 2018), a monograph recently coauthored with my Bard College Berlin colleague Geoff Lehman, I will point to the resonance of the work in number theory, astronomy, and harmonics of Philolaus, a near contemporary of Socrates, with central features of the design principles of the Parthenon. In this way, I hope to show that the Parthenon can be seen as a mediator between the early reception of Ancient Near-Eastern mathematical ideas and their integration into Greek thought as a form of liberal education, as the latter came to be defined by Plato and his followers. Prominently in its pursuit of harmonia (harmony; joining together) without resolving tensions between opposites, the Parthenon engages dialectical thought as we encounter it in Plato's dialogues and in ways that are of enduring relevance for the project of liberal education.

Olin 102  5:30 pm – 7:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
A dramatic reading of Euripides's play Herakles, translated by Dr. Robert Meagher (Hampshire College), followed by a moderated discussion of Moral Injury and Just War with Dr. Meager, Col. David Barnes (West Point Military Academy), and Dr. Mark Santow, University Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Moderated by Dr. Jack Cheng, Clemente Course in the Humanities. The part of Herakles will be read by Emily Donahoe O'Keefe and the part of Theseus will be read by Wayne Pyle.

Free and open to the public!

Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania

Moderated by Wyatt Mason
RKC 103  4:30 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

This presentation is a keynote address for the Translation Symposium at Bard, sponsored by L&L and Bard’s Translation and Translatability Initiative.

A conference on the theory and practice of translation, organised by Bard's Translation and Translatability Initiative.
Bard College Campus  9:00 am – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Tara Mulder, PhD

Visiting Assistant Professor, Vassar College

Olin Humanities, Room 203  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
There are hundreds of Greco-Egyptian magical gems from the 1st–4th centuries CE that have been found all around the Mediterranean. Of these, more than a hundred have been identified as “uterine amulets,” distinguished by a symbolic representation of a uterus accompanied by Egyptian deities and Greek lettering. Current interpretations of these amulets reflect an ignorance of female experience in the ancient world, attributable in part to being written by male scholars. For example, most interpretations focus on only a narrow range of uterine conditions that the amulets may be aimed at curing, and they assume abortion was always an unwanted outcome. In fact, it is likely that certain amulets were intended not to prevent but to induce abortion. In this talk I will give an overview of ancient ideologies of reproduction, with a focus on attitudes toward abortion. I will demonstrate what modern scholars have missed in their analysis of the ancient evidence, including medical and scientific texts, magical papyri, and the uterine amulets. 

David Ungvary, PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This talk takes as its focus the intersection of Christian asceticism, Latin poetry, and Roman identity at the twilight of the Western empire. Under the influence of asceticism, Gallo-Roman writers experimented with poetry—a traditional literary tool of the Roman nobility—as an instrument of pious practice, spiritual transformation, and Christian identification. The talk investigates how innovations in ascetic poetry leveraged the power of classical literature to promote radically new cultural agendas that shaped the postimperial West. At the center of the investigation are the final poems of Sidonius Apollinaris. After renouncing poetic composition for more than a decade, Sidonius returned to verse writing at the end of his career to contemplate the relationship between poetry and Christian life. Close examinations of texts and context reveal how Sidonius’ authorial practice evolved in his post-imperial environment to meet the demands of conflicting social roles and ideologies—Christian and Roman, secular and spiritual, ascetic and poetic. 

Micha Lazarus, Research Fellow,
Trinity College, Cambridge University
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Aristotle's Poetics upended literary thought in the Renaissance, mediating classical models, stimulating generic experiment, and isolating an emergent literary field. Yet it has long been considered either unavailable in England, linguistically inaccessible to the Greekless English, or hopelessly mediated for English readers by Italian criticism. Scholars have thus resisted reading the Poetics into the literary development of sixteenth-century England even where it seems most influential, and the period has been confusingly insulated from the vibrant classical and continental traditions of poetic thought from which, at times, it clearly drew.

In fact, there is plenty of hard evidence that the Poetics was, on the contrary, a real force in Renaissance England, and the untold story of its reception casts both the Poetics and the period in a new light. In this paper I will present two methodological approaches to a restored Poetics. The first traces its arrival in 1540s England through the Byzantine trivium, the Greek pronunciation controversy, scriptural tragedy, and academic readings of classical drama, locating the Poetics within a network of intellectual affiliations now mostly forgotten. Yet restoring the Poetics to critical prominence opens new paths for literary criticism as well as literary history. My second case study will suggest how we might read the Poetics into the fabric of literary composition itself, as close comparison of Hamlet and King Lear finds Shakespeare on the trail of Aristotle's elusive notion of catharsis.

Matthew P. Loar
Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Following decades of civil war in the first century BCE, two separate myths of Hercules attained sudden popularity in Augustan Rome (ca. 31 BCE–14 CE): his epic battle with the robber-monster Cacus, and his transvestite servitude to the Lydian queen Omphale. Traditionally, both myths have been seen as part of an elaborate propaganda campaign orchestrated by/for Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, where the monster-slaying Hercules stands in for Augustus while the cross-dressed Hercules stands in for Marc Antony, Augustus’ onetime rival. However, lost amidst this political jousting are some of the striking similarities between the two myths and the contexts in which they appear. This talk will focus on how one Augustan poet in particular, the Roman elegist Propertius (ca. 47–16 BCE), treats the two myths, arguing that Propertius casts the Omphale myth as a kind of multiform of the Cacus myth, using the former to dress up some of the more troubling aspects of Hercules’ violent interventions in Rome’s mythic pre-history.

Laura L. Garofalo, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics, Loyola University, Maryland
Olin Humanities, Room 102  5:00 pm EST/GMT-5
The talk will analyze the character of the Roman goddess of war, Bellona, in Statius's Thebaid and Valerius Flaccus's Argonautica as a marker of the Roman cultural past. I will also discuss several contemporary parallels in Flavian-era material culture and Roman religious history.

Joshua Billings
Assistant Professor of Classics, Princeton University
Aspinwall 302  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Prometheus has been a trickster, a rebel, a creator, a benefactor, a savior, a blackmailer, and a prisoner, sentenced to gruesome torture. The talk will describe transformations of the figure in antiquity and modernity, and the meaning of the figure today in the context of prison education. 

For more info please contact [email protected]

Adina Hoffman 
Olin Humanities, Room 102  6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Award-winning essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman will discuss her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which is a gripping and intimate journey into the lives of three very different architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.  A powerfully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, the book uncovers multiple layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, in Jerusalem and everywhere, to be foreign and to belong. 
             
Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.
 
 
Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem
“A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate
 
“Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick
 
“Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra

For more info please contact [email protected]

A reading by poet and translator Peter Cole (Yale University)
 
Weis Cinema  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
MacArthur winner Peter Cole reads from his new book, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (American Poets), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work. His poetry, writes Ben Lerner, “is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless.”
 
“Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.”
—Harold Bloom
 
 
 
 
 
For more info please contact [email protected]
 

Emily Allen-Hornblower
Associate Professor of Classics, Director of Undergraduate Studies; Rutgers University
Olin 301  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
This lecture will discuss Alice Oswald’s recent work of poetry, Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (UK 2011, US 2012). I propose to examine how Oswald engages with—but also strays from—her Homeric model in her depictions of death on the battlefield. Oswald’s supple poetic voice deliberately challenges the motif of the glorious death of the hero by mingling together different visions, voices, and temporalities in her retelling of the heroes’ individual stories at the time of their demise, in a manner that gives pride of place to the pain, loss, and destruction that attend their downfall.

  Olin 306  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5

Dr. Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina
Yarshater Assistant Professor of Avestan and Pahlavi at the University of Toronto
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
This conversation, moderated by Shai Secunda (Religion), will probe the efforts of Zoroastrian theologians to make sense of their ancient Iranian tradition; the distinction between theology and critical scholarship in the study of Zoroastrianism; and the sociology of knowledge in a field where  Orientalism, minority identity, and related factors collide. 

Participants are strongly encouraged to read Dr. Vevaina's article “Theologies and Hermeneutics,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015), 211-234, in advance.  

Contact Shai Secunda for a pdf of the article.  

Professor Michael Lurie, Dartmouth College
RKC 103  5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
It is a characteristic of contemporary Western culture that we are constantly told that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that we are commanded to be happy. What if our modern obsession with happiness is a tragic delusion? What if we were not born to be happy at all? What if it would be by far the best for each one of us never to have been born? Is there more to life than being happy? The gloomy, paradoxical notion that it would be by far the best for us not to be born played a crucial role in the daring, and explicitly anti-modernist, visions of pre-Platonic Greek culture advanced in the late 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, but has been largely neglected ever since. In this lecture, we will look at the dark view of the world and man’s place in it that emerges from Greek pre-Platonic literature and thought and try to understand why modernity has always struggled to come to terms with it. 

David Vichnar, PhD, Charles University Prague
OLIN LC 208  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In what is one of the most thoughtful definitions of the entire movement, art critic Clement Greenberg thought the dominant trait of modernism to be "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself". The talk proposes to test this definition on the work of James Joyce and cover the development of his linguistic poetics, tracing his treatment of language as material from Dubliners via A Portrait and Ulysses to Finnegans Wake.

  student curated short-film screenings inspired by PEEP cinema
Preston  5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Students Grace Calderly and Lian Ladia curate a selection of short films focused on "the insider looking or in" and the return of the gaze in the idea of peep cinema. This film program is the students final project for Curating Cinema at CCS Bard.

Kathleen Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics, Harvard University
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium  6:30 pm – 8:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Professor Coleman, James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, is a distinguished teacher and scholar of Latin literature, especially Flavian poetry; the history and culture of the early Empire; Roman arena spectacles; and Roman punishment. As well as serving as a former President of the American Philological Association, chair of the Harvard Department of the Classics, and editor of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Professor Coleman has published widely on topics ranging from Roman graffiti to Hollywood’s presentation of gladiatorial spectacle. Current projects include preparing the manuscript of her 2010 Jerome Lectures for the University of Michigan Press, entitled "Q. Sulpicius Maximus, Poet, Eleven Years Old;” she is also working on book-length projects about Roman public execution and arena spectacles, the topic of her lecture today. 

David Rosenbloom
Olin Humanities, Room 205  5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
Was Athens the benevolent savior of Greece eventually corrupted by a half century of dominance? Do documentary inscriptions offer a vantage point on Athenian imperialism free from rhetoric and ideology? Is imperialism a linguistic practice? Starting from an appraisal of Ian Morris’ recent contention that the Athenian empire was not an empire because it failed to meet minimum qualitative and quantitative thresholds, this talk examines recurring assumptions and arguments in the historiography of the Athenian empire, suggesting that historians of the empire, while earnestly attempting to apply empiricist principles, have mainly succeeded in writing Athenian hegemonic ideology as history.   

a lecture by Julia Scarborough
Olin LC 208  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Why do Virgil’s shepherds stop singing and start killing?  In his heroic epic, the Aeneid, we might expect the poet to leave behind the pastoral world of his Eclogues, where peaceful shepherds devote themselves to song.  Instead, at crucial junctures, shepherds enter the action – with catastrophic results, culminating in war between Aeneas’ Trojans and the Italians with whom they are fated to merge in a new Roman nation.  The clash of pastoral and epic has troubled both ancient and modern critics.  Does Virgil simply not know how to start an epic war?  Are the Italian shepherds innocent victims of an imperialist invasion, or are they violent rustics in need of civilizing leadership?  I argue that the key to understanding the role of pastoral in the epic is recognizing a third genre at work: tragedy.  Shepherds in Attic tragedy bring disruption onto the stage; their good intentions combined with inexperience make them dangerous.  This role offers a paradigm for the part played by shepherds in the Aeneid – including the poem’s most important shepherd: Aeneas himself.  Invoking tensions inherent in the figure of the shepherd in tragedy, Virgil transforms the Homeric metaphor of the hero as shepherd of his people to explore the tragic ironies in which Aeneas is implicated as he struggles to fulfill his destiny.

a lecture by Jacqueline Michelle Arthur-Montagne
Olin LC 208  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
The destruction of the city of Thebes by Alexander the Great in the Greek Alexander Romance is unlike any other account of the event in ancient histories. In the fictional Romance, Alexander engages in a sophistic debate with the flute-player Ismenias on whether the Thebes of the tragic imagination should be preserved. In this presentation, Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne will investigate how this debate reflects on the value and vitality of Athenian tragedy in Imperial Greece, and why prose fiction becomes the genre in which this tragic legacy is contested.

a lecture by Robert Cioffi
Olin Humanities, Room 205  4:30 pm EST/GMT-5
NOTE: New location 
Griffins, giraffes, giants, and gymnosophists (naked sages): these are just a few features of the exoticism on display in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story (Aethiopica, written 3rd/4th century CE). The latest, longest, and grandest of the Greek novels, the Aethiopica has won many fans, from the renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano to Racine to Cervantes. Heliodorus’ narrative shows us how the literary horizons of the Roman empire ignited a very particular Greek fictional imaginary about the edges of the earth, and, long before the likes of Said, it leads us to the heart of an exoticizing ethnographic discourse and a discussion of cultural difference. Focusing on the narrative of the tenth and final book of the Aethiopica, I argue that this book represents both the heights of the genre’s exoticism and also, paradoxically, its undoing. The conclusion of the novel, I propose, marks an end in more than one sense, completing a ritual, completing a narrative, and, in a way, completing a genre by transforming its paradigms. As this novel traverses—and writes—the Mediterranean world, I show that it constructs the identity of humans, cultures, and genres, all the while creating social, cultural, and literary networks in the Roman imperial period.

  Olin Language Center  5:45 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Basic Intensive Latin in Spring 2016 is designed for students with no experience with Latin, to read authors such as Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, and Augustine in the original language after one semester's intensive work (8 credits).

Come and find out more about the course from the teaching team! Students considering taking Basic Intensive Latin in the Spring are strongly encouraged to attend or to contact Prof. Curtis, [email protected], Aspinwall 309.

Mary Beard, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge
Olin Hall  Renowned Classics scholar Mary Beard will pressent lectures on Roman epitaphs and will explore the Roman sensibilities they reveal as well as the part they played in early museology and Victorian fiction. The talks are free and open to the public.

The Arts of Commemoration:
The 2,000-Year History of the Tomb of the Scipios
Monday, September 28th at 5 p.m.; reception at 4:30 p.m.

“Stop a while, traveler, and listen to me” Popular Culture, Grave Humor, and Talking to the Dead
Tuesday, September 29th at 5 p.m.; reception at 4:30 p.m.

She Stayed at Home and Worked Her Wool: How to Remember a Roman Woman
Wednesday, September 30th at 5:45 p.m.; reception at 5:15 p.m.

A fourth lecture will be given at The Morgan Library & Museum on Thursday, October 1st at 6:30 p.m. titled Grave Words: Reconstructing a Roman Tomb From the Appian Way to Laurel Hill, Philadelphia. Tickets for this event are $15; $10 for members and Bard College affiliates; free for students with valid ID.
Please call (212) 685-0008 ext. 560 or e-mail [email protected] for information.

Olin Humanities, Room 202  Join a conversation about the Syrian challenge and the European Union facilitated by Nesrin McMeekin and Greg Moynahan.

This event is sponsored by Bard Model United Nations and The Center for Civic Engagement.

  Olin 102  Interested in applying for a Fulbright Scholarship, a Watson fellowship, or another postgraduate scholarship or fellowship? This information session will cover application procedures, deadlines, and suggestions for crafting a successful application. Applications will be due later this month, so be sure to attend one of the  two information sessions!

Anthony Philip Corbeill
Olin Humanities, Room 102  This talk explores how the daily use by Latin speakers of a single linguistic category—grammatical gender—cultivates a sensitivity to the role of biological sex in Roman perceptions of both the human and more-than-human realms. The presentation has four parts: first, a demonstration that ancient scholars viewed grammatical gender as intricately connected with biological sex, even in the case of inanimate nouns; next the ways in which an awareness of this identification of grammar with biology enhances appreciation of Roman poetry; third, how the Romans imagined their earliest gods; and, finally, Roman attitudes toward human hermaphrodites and their visual representation. No knowledge of Latin, or of ancient Rome, is necessary.

A Lecture by
Anthony Philip Corbeill
Professor of Classics, University of Kansas
Blegen Research Fellow, Vassar College

  A Student Performance by the Advanced Greek Class
Featuring Anne Carson
Campus Center, Multipurpose Room  Refreshments provided.

Olin LC 120  Come and learn about taking Basic Intensive Latin in the spring (Latin 106). The instructor and some current Latin students will be present to talk about the course and answer your questions. Students considering taking Latin 106 are strongly encouraged to attend.

Please note new location: Olin Language Center 120.

  A Reading of Sappho’s Poetry by Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson
Olin Auditorium  Bracko presents the lyric poetry of Sappho, the ancient Greek poet known to many English-speaking readers through Anne Carson’s translation If Not, Winter. In addition to welcoming Sappho’s most distinguished translator to Bard, the event celebrates an extraordinary moment in the history of Sappho’s poetry. Sappho, whose bittersweet poetry on love, longing, and loss has survived the millennia in tantalizing fragments, made headlines in the international press this year because of the rare discovery of two previously unknown poems.

Anne Carson, a classics scholar, poet, essayist, critic, and translator, has won international acclaim across genres. Named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow in 2000, Carson has published 18 books that defy traditional literary genres—merging poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, and translation. Born in Canada, she teaches ancient Greek and is currently Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. Robert Currie is an artist working in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and New York City. An award-winning American writer, playwright, and poet, Nick Flynn has worked as a ship’s captain, an electrician, and as a caseworker with homeless adults. His most recent book is The Reenactments. A professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston, he splits his time between Houston and Brooklyn. Sam Anderson is an American book reviewer and author. He is the critic at large for The New York Times Magazine, and was previously a book critic at New York Magazine. In 2007 he received the Balakian Award for
Excellence in Criticism from the National Book Critics Circle.

Bracko is the closing event of a full-day colloquium, Sappho: New Voices, that will be hosted at Bard College on October 18. The colloquium brings together a panel of experts to lead one of the first public discussions of this important new find of Sappho’s poetry, reevaluating the context, meaning, and implications of Sappho’s poetry and her literary world. The full program of talks, which will be held in Olin 204 and is also free and open to the public, can be found here: http://classicalstudies.bard.edu/events/.

Free and open to the public.

  Olin Humanities, Room 204  Presented by the Bard College Classical Studies Program and sponsored by James H. Ottaway Jr.

Bard's Classical Studies Program will host a day-long colloquium on the ancient Greek poet Sappho in light of the extraordinary discovery this year of two previously unknown poems. The colloquium will bring together a panel of experts to lead one of the first public discussions of this important new find, reevaluating the context, meaning and implications of Sappho's poetry and her literary world. 

Program: 10am: Introduction: Lauren Curtis (Bard College) and Robert Cioffi (Bard College)10.45-12.15: Session 1: Gender and PerformanceTimothy Power (Rutgers University): "Performance Scenarios for the New Poems of Sappho"Melissa Mueller (University of Massachusetts Amherst): "Recentering Epic Nostos: Gender and Genre in the Brothers Poem"

12.15-1.30: Lunch break1.30-3: Session 2: Sappho and Society  Kurt Raaflaub (Brown University): "A High-class Trader, Courtesan, and Poetess, a Tyrant, and Archaic Greek-Eastern Interaction”Deborah Boedeker (Brown University): "Hera and Now"3-3.30: Coffee break3.30-5: Session 3: Religious PoeticsTimothy Barnes (Princeton University): "Sappho's daimon: a Reading of the Fourth Stanza"Albert Henrichs (Harvard University): “What’s in a Prayer? Sappho’s Way with Words"5-5.30: Round table discussionEvening performance: 6pm, Olin AuditoriumBracko: A reading of Sappho by Anne Carson, Robert Currie, Nick Flynn, and Sam Anderson.

NYS Premiere
Chapel of the Holy Innocents  Immerse yourself in the fascinating sounds of the Andean cultures of Latin America, combined with some of the finest choral writing you can imagine! Based on the Roman Catholic Mass, this concert and presentation is the New York Premiere of Jaime Soto's Andean Mass, and will showcase the Alturas Duo and Crescendo Chorus, directed by Christine Gevert. Chilean empanadas, thanks to Los Hornitos Bakery, and other Chilean treats will be served at a reception following the concert. FREE, thanks to La Voz magazine, celebrating its 10th anniversary, ISO and LASO at Bard College.

  Professor Helena Foley of Columbia University is teaching Carolyn Dewald's class today on Aeschylus' Oresteia.
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 

  Olin Humanities, Room 202  Poet and Translator Chuck Stein will read from his new version of Homer's "Iliad" and "Odyssey," and discuss the art of translating Greek epic poetry.

Chapel of the Holy Innocents  A world premiere of Dylan Mattingly's musical setting of the ecstatic and terrifying choruses from Euripides' Bakkhai, in Ancient Greek, with narration by Thomas Bartscherer. Followed by a panel discussion about The Bakkhai and the music of Ancient Greece, by panelists Lauren Curtis (Bard), Helene Foley (Barnard College), and Daniel Mendelsohn (Bard).

The event is free and open to the public.

A lecture by Professor Andrew Johnston, Yale University
Reem-Kayden Center  His talk will investigate how we can study the Roman Empire through inscriptions, what these inscriptions tell us about the lives and identities of individuals, and how the stories of these individuals can ultimately help us develop new and more sophisticated models and understandings of the complexity of the Roman world and the processes of imperialism.

  Blithewood  Enjoy food and drink, hear about the projects and plans of graduating seniors, and give our departing Latinist Ben Stevens a hearty send-off!  All are welcome, on the lawn overlooking the gardens at Blithewood (or in the Fishbowl in case of rain).

  with Daniel Mendelsohn (Bard College), Helene Foley (Barnard), Rachel Kitzinger (Vassar), and Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania)
Fisher Center  A discussion by four experts of Euripides' tragedy The Bakkhai (The Bacchae), with special attention to the unique features of the current production at Bard's Fisher Center. Free and open to the public.

By Euripides
Fisher Center, LUMA Theater  Thursday, April 11 at 7 pm
Friday, April 12 at 7 pm
Saturday, April 13 at 7 pm
Sunday, April 14 at 2 and 7 pm
Tickets: $15; Free for the Bard students (reservations via the Box Office) 

April 13: A post-performance conversation with Ned Moore and Lileana Blain-Cruz, moderated by Thomas Bartscherer. Free and open to the public.

April 14: A post-performance panel discussion (after the matinee) with four eminent classicists: Helene Foley (Barnard College), Rachel Kitzinger (Vassar), Daniel Mendelsohn (Bard College) and Emily Wilson (University of Pennsylvania). Free and open to the public.

Directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz
Translated by Ned Moore ’13

The god Dionysus returns to Thebes to prove his divinity and punish the city's unbelievers. This student production is presented in partnership with Bard's Classical Studies Program.
 

  Patrick Glauthier
Olin 205  Lucan and the Limits of Didactic Poetry: The Case of the Libyan Snakes

This talk will explore the representation of scientific knowledge and didactic poetry in book 9 of Lucan's Civil War.  During an excruciating trek across the Libyan desert, Cato's Roman army arrives at a spring that teams with poisonous snakes. Here, Lucan adopts the role of a didactic poet and teaches the reader about the exotic African serpents, drawing heavily on a tradition of scientific poems on poisonous animals. The troops, however, fail to perceive the nature of the situation, and the snakes soon decimate Cato's army. Natural historical and medical knowledge fail to assist the snakes' victims as well, and the reader is left with the impression that both science and scientific poetry have no meaningful or practical role to play in Lucan's universe. In a world unhinged by civil war and on the verge of total breakdown, the elegant refinement and bookish learning of didactic poetry look like exercises of purely academic interest, entirely divorced from the world they purport to explain.

40 minute talk, followed by Q&A.

  Carrie Mowbray
Olin 202  Problems with Prophecy in Senecan Drama

Examining prophecy via the role of the /vates/ (prophet/poet/bard), I focus on the failures of prophecy in Senecan drama. Prophets who are traditionally (that is, in pre-Senecan Greek and Latin literature) successful at being able to forecast the future—Cassandra, Tiresias, Calchas—are unable to give accurate representations of what will come to pass in Seneca's plays. Where prophecy per se is a flawed enterprise, I argue that we find in the other resonance of /vates/ (poet) characters who are more successful and autonomous at conveying privileged knowledge. With this in mind, I look at Seneca's non-prophet 'usurpers' and make a case for what this can tell us about the status of human-divine relations, and about poetics, in Seneca and in early imperial literature more generally.

  Lauren Curtis
Olin 204  Nymphs in the Night
Performance, Myth and the Transformation of Tradition in Virgil, Aeneid 10

Roman poetry of the Augustan period is full of evocations of Greek song culture. How does such poetry create imagined worlds of performance? How do responses to tradition generate new literary experiences? I address these questions by focusing on a pivotal but underappreciated narrative moment in Virgil’s Aeneid when Aeneas encounters a group of sea nymphs who urge him on to war. The scene recalls and reconfigures a particular constellation of Greek mythic and performance traditions related to choral song and dance. It does so, moreover, while dramatizing the invention of Roman ritual practice. I propose, then, that in Virgil’s narrative, epic gains foundational power from its appropriation of Greek performance culture.

Reem-Kayden Center Bito Auditorium (RKC 103)  Kassandra:
a presentation and discussion with Jean Wagner

Bard College artist-in-residence Jean Wagner has recently written and directed a stage adaptation of the novel Kassandra by the East German writer Christa Wolf.  Wagner, together with actors involved in the project, will present scenes from the performance (both live and on video) and will discuss this ambitious and complex adaptation of a work that is itself a radical re-imagining of the story—recounted by Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil, and others—of the Trojan princess who isblessed and cursed with the ability to see what others can’t.(Refreshments served!)

  Reem-Kayden Center  JOAN CONNELLYProfessor of Classics and Art History, New York University
Director, Yeronisos Island Excavations, Cyprus

The visual culture of ancient Greece has left a record rich with information concerning the active role of women in the organization and administration of the religious life of their cities. Images from vase painting, portrait sculpture, votive reliefs, and funerary monuments, show that women were far more visible than has previously been acknowledged, an active and public force within the social, cultural, and religious arenas of their communities.  Connelly investigates the ways in which their images in architectural sculpture may reflect the ritual circulation of women in procession and dance within the sacred space, and follows women on their paths through priesthood, from their social origins and acquisition of office, to how they dressed, the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, to how they were honored, including at death. 
Prof. Connelly is the author of
Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton 2007)

  Fisher Center, LUMA Theater  2:00 p.m. Dramatic Reading: Sophocles’ tragedy Philoctetes, translated and directed by Bryan Doerries


3:30 p.m. Panel Discussion with Norman Austin, professor emeritus of classics, University of Arizona, and author of Meaning and Being in Myth and Archery at the Dark of the Moon: Poetic Problems in Homer’s Odyssey; Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard, author of Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million; Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society of America and former poetry editor at the New Yorker; and MacArthur Fellow Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming and Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.


The first in a new series of annual events sponsored by James H. Ottaway Jr., the program is free and open to the public.


Sophocles’ Philoctetes, deals with themes of isolation and estrangement, received first prize when it was first performed at the Festival of Dionysus in 409 BCE. The story, takes place during the Trojan War; it focuses on the injured Philoctetes, possessor of the bow of Heracles that was foretold as necessary to win the war against Troy, and the deceptive attempts by Odysseus and Neoptolemus to bring him and the bow with them to Troy. “The title character’s sense of abandonment and search for meaning in his suffering still speaks to us today, perhaps with greater force and urgency than ever before,” according to the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination. “Through modern medicine and warfare, we are creating a vast subclass of chronically ill patients, like Philoctetes, whom we isolate on deserted islands to live long and suffer alone.”


Featured in the reading of Philoctetes are Jesse Eisenberg, who has appeared in the films The Squid and The Whale, Roger Dodger, The Hunting Party, and The Education of Charlie Banks, as well as in Orphans, opposite Al Pacino and Shawn Hatosy, on Broadway; Adam Ludwig, an actor and a member of the Philoctetes Center staff, who has performed at regional theaters throughout the country, including Berkeley Rep, Old Globe, Pittsburgh Public, and A.C.T; and John Schmerling, who has appeared in King Lear, Pericles, Anouilh’s Antigone, The Tempest, Hamlet, and The Brothers Karamazov in off- and off-off-Broadway productions, created the role of Maurice in the original production of Tennessee Williams’s Something Cloudy, Something Clear, and appeared in the reading of Oscar Wilde’s Salome with Al Pacino, Marisa Tomei, and David Strathairn; and Michael Stuhlberg, who has appeared in David Mamet’s new adaptation of The Voysey Inheritance at the Atlantic Theater Company, and on Broadway in The Pillowman, The Invention of Love, Cabaret, Taking Sides, Saint Joan, Timon of Athens.



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