News and Events

A&S Magazine: Prof. Callier fighting to keep Latin classes alive through video storytelling

Brian Gordon — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 16:38:15 +0000

A&S Magazine: Prof. Callier fighting to keep Latin classes alive through video storytelling Brian Gordon Thu, 04/03/2025 - 10:38

For Reina Callier, learning Latin ‘is like lifting weights for your brain’

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4/9 AIA Lecture: 'The Past in the Past, The Power of Monuments in Ruin'

Brian Gordon — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 17:02:48 +0000

4/9 AIA Lecture: 'The Past in the Past, The Power of Monuments in Ruin' Brian Gordon Sun, 03/09/2025 - 11:02

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4/28 Lecture: 'The Invention of Chaos in Hesiod & Ovid'

Brian Gordon — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 18:07:36 +0000

4/28 Lecture: 'The Invention of Chaos in Hesiod & Ovid' Brian Gordon Sat, 03/08/2025 - 11:07

Presented by Glenn Most
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought

Monday, April 28th at 5:00 P.M. | Humanities 250

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF OUR CONCEPT OF CHAOS?

The term 'chaos' appears for the first time in world literature in a remarkable passage in Hesiod's Theogony, but almost certainly it does not have the meaning there that it has in modern languages; and this modern meaning cannot be found attested in any ancient Greek or Latin text before it appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

The lecture examines the figure of Chaos at the beginning of the cosmogony in the Theogony and considers the meaning that Hesiod may have plausibly been thought likely to have assigned to it there, and the various interpretations, explicit and implicit, found in the ancient and medieval exegetical traditions to this passage and in other comparable Greek cosmogonies. It then examines the passage in the Metamorphoses that may plausibly be claimed to be the source of the modern understanding of the concept and asks how Ovid might have come up with this usage.

Sponsored by the Center for Humanities & the Arts and the Department of Classics

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Monday, April 28th at 5PM | Eaton Humanities 250

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McClanahan Lecture: 'King of the World, King of Assyria!'

Brian Gordon — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 22:00:09 +0000

McClanahan Lecture: 'King of the World, King of Assyria!' Brian Gordon Sun, 03/02/2025 - 15:00

A Mary E.V. McClanahan Lecture

Presented by Professor Beth Dusinberre, Classics Department

Wednesday, April 2nd at 7PM
Eaton Humanities 250

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Wednesday, April 2nd at 7PM | Eaton Humanities 250

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AIA Lecture: 'Normalizing Loot: A Case Study of a Plundered Imperial Shrine'

Brian Gordon — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:09:56 +0000

AIA Lecture: 'Normalizing Loot: A Case Study of a Plundered Imperial Shrine' Brian Gordon Fri, 02/28/2025 - 13:09

Presented by Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe (Professor of Art History, Colgate University)

Wednesday, March 12th at 7PM, Eaton Humanities 1B80 and via Zoom

This talk will discuss a corpus of dozens of life-size bronze statues of Roman emperors and empresses that were looted in the 1960s at Bubon, an unexcavated site in southern Turkey, and ended up in collections across the U.S. What was lost in the process? Why–and how–are some museums resisting efforts to return these statues to Turkey today?

Wednesday, March 12th at 7PM in HUMN 1B80 and via Zoom

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Lecture: 'Pompeii as a Platform: The Present and Near-Term Future of Reusable Data from a Roman City'

Brian Gordon — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:24:33 +0000

Lecture: 'Pompeii as a Platform: The Present and Near-Term Future of Reusable Data from a Roman City' Brian Gordon Thu, 02/27/2025 - 09:24

Presented by Dr. Sebastian Heath (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University)

Wednesday, March 5th at 7PM | Eaton Humanities 135

ABSTRACT: This talk reports on the work of the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP), which was a Getty Foundation funded collaboration between the speaker and Prof. Eric Poehler of UMASS Amherst, and on the current Pompeii Linked Open Data (P-LOD) initiative, a more open-ended effort under the same direction. PALP produced a website that supports sitewide investigation and P-LOD is now focused on the long-term availability of reusable data, on developing new computational approaches to exploring that data, and on delivering new forms of public interaction with its resources. The talk will follow this same arc.

The PALP website demonstrates that applying the principles of Linked Open Data (LOD) to Pompeii enables both sitewide and detailed exploration of the contents of Pompeian wall-painting. Our goal is to make issues of association and distribution easily browsable by all. Myth, natural history, daily life and other topics can now all be explored. PALP is, however, just a website. P-LOD is engaged in delivering reusable data with a particular focus on using it in modern, low-cost computational environments that many people can access. This will be demonstrated, with an emphasis on the ability to conceive and implement new research agendas. It is also the case that change is in the air. Generative AI is an opportunity to explore new forms of interaction with large datasets.

This talk takes the point-of-view that it is archaeologists (or classicists or historians) who should be exploring these tools to see what contribution - if any - they can make. Such early - though results oriented - explorations will be shown in the context of the massive dataset that PALP and P-LOD have compiled for Pompeii.

PALP: https://palp.art
P-LOD: https://p-lod.org

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Wednesday, March 5th in Eaton Humanities 135

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Fresco from the House of Julia Felix, Pompeii depicting scenes from the Forum market

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Lecture: 'IN THE LAND OF NINKASI - A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia'

Brian Gordon — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:23:00 +0000

Lecture: 'IN THE LAND OF NINKASI - A History of Beer in Ancient Mesopotamia' Brian Gordon Thu, 02/20/2025 - 10:23

February 26, 2025 at 5:00pm in Ekeley Science Building E1B20

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Lecture: 'The Migration of Miniatures in Italian Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie'

Brian Gordon — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:52:44 +0000

Lecture: 'The Migration of Miniatures in Italian Manuscripts of the Roman de Troie' Brian Gordon Mon, 02/17/2025 - 10:52

Presented by Marilynn Desmond
(English, General Literature and Rhetoric: SUNY Binghampton)

Monday, February 24th @ 5:00PM | HUMN 250

Troy was of immense importance in the dynastic politics of the Middle Ages, with all the major polities claiming their origins in a Trojan founder. The Roman de Troie (c. 1165) was a French verse romance on the matter of Troy which circulated widely in medieval French-speaking regions and survives in over sixty manuscripts and fragments (more than any other twelfth-century French text). It was translated into Latin, Demotic Greek, Italian and German, and five distinct prose “intralingual” versions were produced. In addition to these textual traditions, the Roman de Troie also generated extensive visual traditions that then migrated into other textual traditions on the matter of Troy. Prof. Desmond’s talk will focus upon five manuscripts of the Roman de Troie produced in fourteenth-century Italy which contain elaborate programs of illustration that exhibit a shared iconography entirely distinct from the visual programs in Roman de Troie manuscripts produced in the Kingdom of France. This paper will use the illustrations to explore the networks and materiality of the artistic tool-world that enabled this specialised iconography to migrate throughout the Italian peninsula, offering a distinctive interpretation of the political significance of Troy. The event should be of interest to classicists, historians and art historians, medievalists, and those working in the Romance languages, as well as humanists in general."

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Monday, February 24th in HUMN 250

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AIA Lecture: A Late Bronze Age “Naval Station” at Kalamianos (Saronic Gulf), Greece?

Brian Gordon — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 20:39:25 +0000

AIA Lecture: A Late Bronze Age “Naval Station” at Kalamianos (Saronic Gulf), Greece? Brian Gordon Wed, 01/22/2025 - 13:39

Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 at 7PM

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AIA Lecture: 'Stress, Sex, and Death: Health and Survival in the Context of Medieval Famine and Plague'

Brian Gordon — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 19:10:05 +0000

AIA Lecture: 'Stress, Sex, and Death: Health and Survival in the Context of Medieval Famine and Plague' Brian Gordon Mon, 01/20/2025 - 12:10

Wednesday, February 19 at 7PM in Eaton Humanities 250

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