Daniel Mendelsohn Interviewed in the New York Review of Books
Daniel Mendelsohn, the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities, spoke with the New York Review of Books about his new translation of Homer’s Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press. In conversation with Lauren Kane, Mendelsohn discussed the challenges of balancing both poetic beauty and literal meaning in translating, the ways in which the story handles depictions of family relationships, and why the epic is experiencing a resurgence in modern retellings.
Robert Cioffi reviewed The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner for the London Review of Books. The book explores the papyri of Wadi el-Jarf, written between 2607 and 2605 BCE, which Cioffi says are "a first-hand account of the men who built the Great Pyramid of Giza.” Thanks to the papyri, “For the first time in 4500 years, Khufu’s pyramid has its voices again: not of priests or pharaohs but of the men who made it possible.” Read More >>
James Romm, James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, will take part in a conversation with Bard president Leon Botstein to discuss Romm’s new book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece, at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck on Tuesday, May 13. Read More >>
Tim Whitmarsh, University of Cambridge Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium5:30 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.
Monday, December 5, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Wednesday, November 30, 2022
Carolyn Dewald (Bard) with James Romm (Bard) and Rachel Friedman (Vassar) Hegeman 204A6:00 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.
Monday, November 28, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, November 21, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, November 14, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, November 7, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, October 31, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Friday, October 28, 2022
Andrew Gregory, University College London Hegeman 20412:00 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.
Monday, October 24, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Wednesday, October 19, 2022
Sarah Ruden, University of Pennsylvania Olin Humanities, Room 1025:15 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.
Tuesday, October 18, 2022
Campus Center, Weis Cinema6:00 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.
Monday, October 17, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, October 10, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, October 3, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, September 26, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Monday, September 19, 2022
Joins us weekly. Stay for as long as you like. Kline, College Room1:00 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.
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
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.