The following list includes graduate courses taught by faculty members of the Graduate Group and graduate courses offered by other programs and departments. Graduate students are also strongly encouraged to explore courses in other fields and disciplines that align with their scholarly interests. While certain courses are considered mandatory, we are committed to enabling our students to develop their own scholarly profiles, and there is great flexibility in crafting an itinerary through the program. All course choices are made in consultation with the Graduate Group Chair.
ANCH 6102 Problems in Hellenistic History
Julia Wilker
M 1:45pm-4:44pm
This course will explore seminal trends and debates that have shaped modern inquiries in the period between the campaigns of Alexander and the Battle of Actium. The purpose of the seminar is to gain familiarity with the field of Hellenistic studies broadly defined as well as specific approaches. Special emphasis will be laid on the debate of whether terms such as “Hellenism” or “Hellenization” adequately describe the complex political, social, and cultural dynamics of the period and the new frameworks of interaction, confluence, and power structures that shaped it.
GREK 7201 Troy and Homer
Sheila Murnaghan
C. Brian Rose
T 1:45pm-4:44pm
An interdisciplinary seminar focusing on the city of Troy both as an archaeological site and as the setting of the legendary Trojan War. We will consider Homer's Iliad (with selected sections read in Greek) together with the topography and archaeology of the site of Troy in order to address a series of interrelated questions: What are the points of continuity and discontinuity between the stories told by the literary tradition and the material record? How do both types of evidence contribute to our understanding of political relations and cultural interactions between Greece and Anatolia in the Bronze Age? How do Hittite sources bear on our reconstruction of the events behind the Troy legend? How have the site and the poem contributed to each other's interpretation in the context of scholarly discovery and debate? We will give some attention to modern receptions of the Troy legend that deliberately combine material and textual elements, such as Cy Twombly's "Fifty Days at Iliam" and Alice Oswald's "Memorial: An Excavation of Homer's Iliad." The seminar will include a visit to the site of Troy during the Spring Break.
LATN 7004 The Worlds of the Latin Novel
James Ker
R 1:45pm-4:44pm
This seminar will explore the worlds of Petronius’ Satyrica, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, and other works of Latin prose fiction, devoting equal time to literary, historical, and material dimensions. Participants will devise research topics to serve as the focus of presentations and a seminar paper. Latin is not required, but the regular reading assignments will include Latin options, both from ancient novels and from modern novellae (a recent innovation in Latin learning).
ANCH 7403 Borderlines: Art and Artifact in the Roman Empire
W 3:30pm-6:29pm
Ann Kuttner
What made art and artifacts `Roman', or not, in a Roman world? `Roman provincial art` is an active scholarly category. This seminar reframes it, to test productive models to understand visual culture outside the empire’s Italian heartland from the Late Republic into Late Antiquity, in the Roman polity’s interactions with many peoples in situations of diaspora, colonization, hegemony, conflict, economic exchange, and religious interaction. As `Rome’ expanded, cultural relations across many borderlines – social, ethnic, territorial - potentially became cultural politics. A traditional topic for that has been Roman interaction with Greek culture. This seminar extends that range, while tackling `Hellenization’, as we reflect on models of `Romanization’, globalism and identity formation within the imperium’s boundaries in its provinces and client kingdoms, and also at its frontier zones. Various disciplines apply: art history, archaeology, history, and more. Case studies, evolved with students, may range from Britain to Iran, northern Africa to the Black Sea in space and, in time, from interactions with the Hellenistic East and West and with Iron Age Europe, to the age of Germanic, Sasanian and Ummayad conquests of Roman terrain, ca 3rd c. BCE-7th c. CE. The market in art and artifact, the nature and status of makers, and conditions of patronage and viewing are key considerations. Private and public objects, images, architecture and urbanism, and landscapes can all concern us, as we try out disciplinary approaches that take in eg cultural appropriation, translation and hybrity, creolization, discrepant experience, object agency, and communities of taste and style. `Ethnicity’ is a loaded concept in ancient Mediterranean studies, as is `race;’ our course must engage those, and the ways in which things and styles have been made to serve those terms. And who owns, is heir to, the cultural legacies we look at, and how to name them, are problems that tangle with current national identity formation, and academic and museum practice. Our own Museum's holdings can make topics. Students are welcome to bring in interests in language and text cultures, in disciplines outside art history and archaeology, and in other world cultures and epochs.
GREK 5801 Greek Prose Composition
James Ker
TR 10:15am-11:44am
This course will provide a systematic review of ancient Greek prose writing, both through the analysis of texts and through exercises in translation and free composition. The course is open to undergraduates beyond the intermediate level and to graduate students. For undergraduates, the course is an opportunity to gain extra clarity and confidence in the language. A common set of exercises will be assigned to all students, but graduate students will also be assigned more challenging exercises.
GREK 7402 Aristophanes and Old Comedy
Ralph Rosen
W 1:45pm-4:44pm
This advanced graduate seminar in ancient Greek literature will focus in detail on several plays of Aristophanes and selections from his contemporaries in Old Comedy, Cratinus and Eupolis. Special attention will be paid both to questions of genre and comic dynamics, and to the historical and political contexts in which these plays were first performed.
CLST 7701 Medieval Poetics: Europe and India
Rita Copeland
Deven Patel
M 1:45pm-4:44pm (1/11 to 4/26)
This is a comparative course on medieval stylistic practices, formal innovations, and especially theories of form. Our common ground will be the theories that were generated in learned and pedagogical traditions of medieval literary cultures of Europe and pre-modern India (with their roots in ancient thought about poetic form).
This is a comparative course on medieval stylistic practices, formal innovations, and especially theories of form. Our common ground will be the theories that were generated in learned and pedagogical traditions of medieval literary cultures of Europe and pre-modern India (with their roots in ancient thought about poetic form). We will also collaborate on the particulars of the vernacular cultures that stamped their interests on the interplay of language, genre, and form. Questions common to all the literary traditions may be the social, ethical, and epistemological roles of poetry. Other common questions include the distinctively medieval terms of interpretive theory and practice; technologies of interpretation; theories of fiction; the histories of the language arts; transformations of the terminology of figurative language; grammatical orthopraxis and permitted “deviation”; and material texts. As we turn from interpretive to generative categories, we will consider how arts of poetry find their linguistic and stylistic focus in the vocabularies of individual vernacular traditions.
CLST 7311 Petrography of Cultural Materials
Marie-Claude Boileau
W 10:15am-1:14pm
Introduction to thin-section petrography of stone and ceramic archaeological materials. Using polarized light microscopy, the first half of this course will cover the basics of mineralogy and the petrography of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. The second half will focus on the petrographic description of ceramic materials, mainly pottery, with emphasis on the interpretation of provenance and technology. As part of this course, students will characterize and analyze archaeological samples from various collections. Prior knowledge of geology is not required.
ANCH 9000 Prospectus Workshop
Jeremy McInerney
T 5:15pm-7:14pm
Designed to prepare graduates in any aspect of study in the ancient world to prepare for the dissertation prospectus. Course will be centered around individual presentations and group critique of prospectus' in process, as well the fundamentals of large-project research design and presentation.