Who We Are
The Department of Greek and Latin is devoted to the study of the languages, literature, and cultures of Greece and Rome, focusing on Antiquity but including all periods from the Bronze Age to Modern Greece. This study is important, as the origins of western and much Near Eastern literature, philosophy, art, religion, and social forms lay in the ancient world, making Greece and Rome vital contributors to ongoing discussions of "who we are" in a broader sense. The aim of our scholarship and teaching, however, is not only to document origins but to question the relationship between texts and social practices in both antiquity and modern times as well as to challenge current assumptions. The cultures of Greece and Rome provide us with provocative standpoints from which to understand our own very different world of rapid social and technological change. Conversely, we also recognize that our ways of looking at antiquity are evolving in response to the changes in the world around us.
In both the teaching of its courses and in research, the Department is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The faculty unite Greek and Latin philology with perspectives informed by a diversity of theoretical disciplines that are central to debates taking place in the humanities and the social sciences across Departments and Centers. For example, members of our faculty bring comparative methodologies and cultural studies to the understanding of ancient religions; practice theoretically-informed readings of ancient literature and culture; participate in broader discussions of gender in antiquity and comparative folklore; and trace the reception of classical culture in the Middle Ages, Byzantium, and Modern Greece. We are interested in the history of classical studies as an aspect of modern thought and in asking why scholarship is done in the ways that it is. Our affiliated faculty contribute courses and expertise from other fields, including Philosophy, History, Art History, and Linguistics.
The strengths of the Department lie especially in the following fields: (a) ancient religion and myth down to the Middle Ages; (b) literary critical readings of antiquity from theoretical perspectives that include psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and reception theory; (c) epigraphy and Latin paleography, advanced also by the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies; (d) the diachronic Greek tradition, ranging from the Bronze Age to Byzantium and Modern Greece. It is one of few Departments that host a Modern Greek Program, which offers courses in language, literature, and contemporary culture, including the Greek-American Diaspora.
Recent and Forthcoming Faculty Publications
(for past publications see individual pages)
Anagnostou, Yiorgos
- Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009).
- "Against Cultural Loss: Immigration, Life History, and the Enduring 'Vernacular.'" In Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity, edited by Katerina Zacharia, 355-77. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008
- Caesar's Civil War (Oxford, 2006).
- "Plautine Farce and Plautine Freedom: An Essay on the Value of Metatheatre," in W. Batstone and G. Tissol, eds., Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature (New York: Lang, 2005) 13-46.
- Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday (Brepols, 2008).
- "Ovid's Transformations in Medieval France (ca. 1100-ca. 1350)," in A. Keith and S. Rupp, eds., Metamorphosis: The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto, 2007) 33-60.
- "Plato reread too late: Philosophical Citation and Affiliation in Apuleius' Apologia' Ramus 38.1 (2009) (forthcoming).
- 'No Success Like Failure: Apuleius and the Task of the Translator' In M. Paschalis, S. Panayotakis, G. Schmeling (eds) 2009. Readers and Writers in the Ancient Novel (Ancient Narrative Supplementum 12) Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, 184-196.
- Apollo (Routledge, 2008, forthcoming).
- Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, Routledge, 2007.
- "This is the Death of the Earth: Crisis narratives in Archilochus and Mnesiepes," Transactions of the American Philological Association 139 (2009) 1-20
- "Out-Foxing the Wolf-Walker: Lycambes as performative rival to Archilochus," Classical Antiquity 27.1 (2008) 93-114.
- Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the Iliad (Oxford, 2008, forthcoming).
- "The Muses' Uncanny Lies: Hesiod, Theogony 27 and its Translators," American Journal of Philology 128 (2007) 153-175.
- Ancient Greek Divination (Blackwell, 2008).
- Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets, Routledge, 2007.
- Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature. (Forthcoming, Stanford University Press)
- Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cambridge University Press).
- Co-edited with Michael Dietler, Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (Harvard University Press, forthcoming)
- “One Wife, One Love: Coniugalis Amor, Grief, and Masculinity in Statius’ Silvae," in Emotion, Genre, Gender in Antiquity, ed. Dana Munteanu (London: Duckworth), forthcoming 2010.
- “Heard But Not Seen: Domitian and the Gaze in Statius’ Silvae,” Classical Journal, 104.2 (2008/09): 145-62
- "Caesar and Caesarian Section: The Poetics of Childbirth in Ovid's Metamorphoses," in E. Cingano and L. Milano, eds., Literature and Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece, Rome, and the Near East (Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità e del Vicino Oriente dell'Università Ca' Foscari) (forthcoming).
- "The Ritual of Therapy: Venus the Healer in Virgil's Aeneid," in A. Barchiesi, J. Rüpke, and S. Stephens, eds., Rituals in Ink: Proceedings from a Colloquium on Roman Religion (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004) 77-97.
