The Yale Classics Department colloquium series for 2025–2026 focuses on the theme of ‘Literary Innovations: New Forms of Reading and Writing in the Imperial Period and Late Antiquity.’ In The Space that Remains (2014), Aaron Pelttari described new ways that later Latin authors developed for involving the reader in the production of meaning. Since that book, many different scholars have explored ways of reading and writing that are fresh and new in the literature of the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity and developed modes of interpretation to fit the distinct structures and cultural contexts of those works. This series will shed light on a host of exciting approaches to later Latin and Greek literature with the aim of emphasizing what is innovative about the postclassical literary world.
Our presenters span multiple disciplines and cover a range of different approaches. Some will emphasize the materiality of the literary text and the evolving conditions of its creation. Others will focus on hermeneutic advances and the genesis of new modes of reading within the rhetorical tradition. Others will focus on the ways in which Christianity shaped methods of reading and writing and transformed earlier literary devices to convey transcendent new meanings. All, we hope, will emphasize what is exciting and worthwhile about studying later Latin and Greek texts.
The colloquium series is intended to coincide with a graduate seminar taught this year at Yale, CLSS 7485 (‘Being Greek Under the Roman Empire’), which examines the literature and politics of Greek identity in the Imperial period. But all talks will be open to the public, and we hope that the presentations will be useful to anyone with interests in Classics, Comparative Literature, the history of Late Antiquity, and Early Christianity.
September 19, 2025: Candida Moss (Birmingham), “Hidden Hands and Invisible Disabilities: Enslavement and Literary Culture in the Roman Mediterranean”
October 24, 2025: Bryant Kirkland (UCLA), “ ‘Vessels of Cognition’: Transcendence and Context in Dio Chrysostom’s Olympian Oration”
November 7, 2025: Cat Lambert (Cornell), “Navel gazing: the umbilicus and the Roman reader”
January 30, 2026: Benedek Kruchio (Yale): “Allegory, allegoresis, and imperial Greek poetry”
February 20, 2026: Stephen Kidd (Brown): “Literary Judgement in Imperial Rhetorical Theory”
March 6, 2026: Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed (Uppsala): “Proba: The First Christian Woman Poet”
April 3, 2026: Aaron Pelttari (Edinburgh): “Literary Innovations in the Scriptural Poetry of Late Antiquity”
“As to diseases, make a habit of two things—to help, or at least to do no harm. The art [of medicine] has three factors: the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must cooperate with the physician in combating the disease.” –[Hipp.] Epid. 1.11
“The history of illness is not the history of medicine—it’s the history of the world—and the history of having a body could well be the history of what is done to most of us in the interests of the few…” –Anne Boyer
Cross-disciplinary in approach, Ancient Bodies, in Sickness and Health, examines traditions of medicine, health, and healing in ancient Mediterranean communities, and explores the long afterlife of ancient GraecoRoman medicine in later Islamic and European traditions. Covering a wide array of topics— including ancient diagnostic practices, notions of the body, environmental determinism, plague and pandemic, mobility and disability, gynecological theories of women’s health and disease, drugs, surgery, the training and work of physicians, the experiences of patients, and the various spaces in which healing took place—this colloquium aims to engage a broad audience interested in the history of Graeco-Roman medicine, in addition to its reception and adaptation within later traditions. We seek especially to ask: What resources does medicine afford towards understanding sickness and health in the ancient world? What gaps does it leave? What shape should a study of ancient medicine attentive to these lacunae assume?
This year-long colloquium, generously funded by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, strives to explore current trends and new approaches in the fields of ancient medicine, healthcare, disease, and history of the body through a variety of interdisciplinary lenses. We ask how ancient medicine can be used to think about broader histories of illness, health, and embodiment in the ancient world and examine the rich methodological and evidentiary resources that Graeco-Roman medicine can offer the disciplines of Classics, History, and Philosophy. Our roster of speakers traverse a broad geographic and chronological scope, ranging from the “Hippocratic” medical writings of Classical Greece down through Graeco-Arabic medical traditions, making use of philological, historical, material, archaeological, and theoretical lines of inquiry.
This colloquium is particularly timely as it dovetails in exciting ways with undergraduate and graduate curriculum planned for Yale’s 2024-25 academic year, including a CLSS-HIST-HSHM graduate seminar on “Graeco-Roman Medicine,” undergraduate and graduate Greek language courses on Hippocratic medical treatises, and a new CLCV-RLST-HIST undergraduate lecture on “Medicine, Magic, Miracle.” Interested departments and programs will include: Classics, Philosophy, History, History of Science and Medicine, Religious Studies, WGSS, and in some instances, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. All are welcome for monthly lunch seminars in Phelps 401.
The 2023-2024 Classics Departmental Colloquium was organized around the theme “Seeing the Other Through Classical Lenses.”
The Classics Departmental Colloquium for 2022-23, “Negotiating Empire”, investigates the manifold ways in which individuals throughout history have negotiated the presence of the Roman Empire, in all its forms. A famous poet or philosopher’s explorations of the conceptual boundaries of empire are of no more significance to this project that the day-to-day interactions between a provincial and the long arm of the imperial administration. Likewise, claims to control the legacy of the Empire in modern society are no more important as instances of reception than the rejection of Rome’s inheritance.
The subtitle of the colloquium, “Reception/Resistance in Ancient and Modern Societies” offers two broad ways of dealing with the empire, which need not be mutually exclusive. Reception need not be a passive act, nor must resistance imply rejection alone; instead, it might also be used of a ‘confrontation’ with a concept or lived reality, whereby a receiving individual seeks to comprehend, master, or alter the object of confrontation. Every engagement adds nuance to the picture we have of the Empire and allows us to engage in a constant process of re-conceptualization. In particular, we hope to bring together ancient historians, cultural historians, and practitioners of reception studies to engage in productive interdisciplinary dialogue and cast new light on the way that Rome has been experienced and conceptualized throughout history. To achieve this, we have not only invited speakers with relevant research to the theme but have also planned two collaborative sessions for the Yale Classics community, to draw on our distinct strengths in both social history and reception studies.
The 2022-2023 colloquium was organized by Eleanor Martin and Thomas Munro.
To live in the twenty-first century is to experience the ways that an ever-more capacious concept of property shapes life on earth. Beyond the scope of land and goods, claims to ownership range over ideas, images, practices, and language. The only limit to property’s reach, at least in the enlightened rhetoric of modernity, are human beings themselves. Yet, here too technologies of enslavement have taught contemporary agents of capitalism how to make property out of bodies, behaviors, time, and labor. As we navigate property relations in a world of worker surveillance, limited-liability companies, patent hoarders, non-fungible tokens, genetic sequencing, blockchains, and big data it seems increasingly urgent to query the very idea of property and to examine the ways it structures relations, affects, and actions in the world.
With “Property (and its Discontents)” as its chosen theme, the 2021-2022 departmental colloquium proposes that classicists and scholars of the ancient Mediterranean have valuable insights to add to these conversations.
Ancient historians and legal experts have long investigated how communities in antiquity conceptualized property and ownership. These efforts have yielded nuanced frameworks for identifying, differentiating, and understanding the institutions and individual practices that maintained attachments between property and people or collective entities. Past approaches have analyzed lexica and trends in discourse, measured economic performance and productivity, and charted the operations of multi-actor systems. The literature on these topics has been enormously influential. Yet, yesterday’s orthodoxies are evolving through contact with new theoretical commitments and perspectives. Complexity theory pushes scholars to think more dynamically about how institutions, states, and individual economic strategies develop in tandem. Ecocriticism broadens the range of stakeholders beyond human actors and questions the extractive ethos that underlies more traditional economic and legal models.
Beyond the economic and legal spheres, ideas about property have had a major impact on the work of those studying the texts and artifacts of the ancient Mediterranean. The project of orienting words, objects, and ideas within the past has historically entailed putting the question “whose?” to surviving evidence. For philologists this impulse may be seen in activities such as authorial ascription, authenticity criticism, or stylistic evaluation. For archaeologists and art historians, the attribution of an object to an artist, an owner, a period, or a place has long counted as a valid contribution to the academy’s collective knowledge. In recent years, these more traditional approaches have ceded ground to theoretical interventions such as those of Radical Philology, Distributed Authorship, Object-Oriented Ontology, and Posthumanism — all of which challenge the validity or relevance of property relations. At the same time, a growing number of researchers are examining the technologies and tactics whereby ancient actors in all walks of life made, enforced, adjudicated, and disputed proprietary claims. Seals and signatures; brands and collars; archives and witnesses; plagiarists, forgers, copyists, fugitives, imitators, and thieves have never before cornered so large a share of scholarly fascination. As new research continues to show, the apparent simplicity of the genitive case belies an endlessly complex social system of attachment. Arising also from this trend also is an unsettling realization of the ways that proprietary claims across a range of media are inflected by patterns of ownership developed in the crucible of ancient slavery.
The question “whose?” also points us toward the strained disciplinary logics of the contemporary university. Classicists, both among themselves and in broader public discourse, are at the center of major debates about how domains of knowledge are defined, shaped, changed, and maintained — what belongs in the field; what does it mean to claim a tradition, a practice, a culture, a method, a case study; to whom does the past belong; what kind of claim does history have over the present; what kind of claim does the present have over the future? For navigating this self-reflexive turn in academic life, we see a thorough investigation of the notions of property and ownership as a crucial second-order step.
To examine these issues and any further affordances of the theme, we invite the Yale Classics community and its welcome guests to join us for a year-long discussion of Property (and its Discontents).
Schedule:
Fall (likely via Zoom), Fridays 12-1:30:
Spring:
—
For further information, please contact Chris Londa (christopher.londa@yale) or Joe Morgan (joseph.morgan@yale.edu).
How do Greek and Latin authors respond to the contingency and fragility of “the human condition”? How do they envision and react to those forces that strive to master the contingent and the unpredictable through the consolidation of power or the exercise of violence? How might their responses affect our own acts of scholarly interpretation and political imagination?
These are key questions for understanding both classical antiquity and our own present, which so often looks toward the classics for validation or — conversely — for something to abjure. Thus, instead of treating classical antiquity as either originary or irrelevant, we stage a dialogue between past and present, examining equally the ways in which this dialogue has been staged in the past, both for better and for worse.
Benedict Anderson suggested that modern nationalism depends upon widely disseminated material printed in a common language (1983). The public sphere, he maintained, relied upon print readers. In the modern world, the development of the printing press and the subsequent market for vernacular books and print publications created and reinforced discourse within language communities.
In most ancient Greek and Roman communities, the public sphere was also dappled with the written word — from public inscriptions on stone, metal, and wood, to papyrus documents, to painted and incised graffiti. Even loaves of bread and terracotta roof tiles were stamped with words and letters that carried messages with meaning. Latin and Greek inscriptions survive in the hundreds of thousands from as far east as modern Afghanistan, as far west as the British Isles and Morocco, and as far south as the mouth of the Red Sea. All of these texts were constitutive of identity, which operated on the political, literary, and — one could argue — national level. The practice of inscribing texts was itself historically determined, an idea first crystalized by Yale’s Ramsay MacMullen in a famous article on “The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire” American Journal of Philology 103 (1982) 233-46. The creation of civic and imperial public inscriptions continues uninterrupted from the sixth-century BCE to the sixth-century CE. So too, do private texts, which stretch across time and space and provide invaluable information for ancient literary and social practices that constitute communities — from the commercial lead letters of Emporion (Spain) and Olbia (Black Sea), to the postcard-sized wooden tablets unearthed at the fort of Vindolanda (Britain), to the verse inscriptions of dedications found all across the greater Mediterranean. Inscribed and written texts were at the heart of ancient political, economic, social, religious, and literary communities.
“Epigraphic Habits: Ancient Epigraphy and Ancient Identity,” seeks to explore current trends and new approaches in the field of ancient history, religion, and literature through the lens of the inscribed text. The lineup of speakers will traverse a broad geographic and chronological scope, from Archaic Greece to Punic North Africa, to Roman Republic and ultimately Late Antiquity. Moreover, the speakers to be recruited specialize in literary and not just documentary texts; detailed analyses of old texts and presentations of newly discovered documents will be included, as will theoretically informed discussions of dossiers of inscriptions.
The following lectures were postponed until 2020-21:
Style is a primary category of analysis that informs various fields across the Humanities at large. Stylistic analysis using various methodologies such as close reading, metrical analysis, autopsy, or comparisons of data sets, allow the scholar to organize his or her subjects of study (e.g., literary papyri, anonymous texts, official documents, artifacts) and generate taxonomies of dates, authors, places of production, etc. (See, Richard T. Neer, ‘Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style’, Critical Inquiry, 32: 1, 2005, 1-26.)
While serving as an empirical tool of inquiry, style is also central to various histories of art and literature that have traditionally focused on reconstructing the development of one or more styles across periods and have been patterned around successive waves of peak and decline of one or more particular style(s). A notable example is Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, Dresden, 1764.
The seminar series for 2018-2019 seeks to interrogate the under-examined connection between style as an empirical category and style as a core element of histories of art and literature, by exploring the historiographies of style. The word “style”, derived from the Latin word for pen (stilus), is predicated on the distinction between content and form or outward expression, which, once described and classified across a variety of authors and artefacts, becomes known as a specific style. The etymological connection between a term for an implement - the pen- and the term “style” encapsulates the inherent tie between the process of creating whether through writing, or drawing, and the formal qualities of the resultant work, whether a literary passage or an image. It also speaks to the fundamental connection between the visual and literary arts already witnessed in antiquity. Art is used as a metaphor to describe literature from the earliest times. “Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting with the gift of speech”, is the well-known adage ascribed to Simonides in Plutarch, De gloria Atheniensium 3.346f., while the visual realm has a central role in in ancient rhetorical analysis, as discussed for instance in Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice, Farnham, 2009. Perhaps most strikingly, narratives of the history of rhetoric articulate notions of stylistic developments and at the same time are among the most important sources for the reconstruction of the history of Greek and Roman art, in particular Cicero, Brutus 70; Quintilian, On the Education of the Orator 12.10; and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35-6. These ancient accounts that have informed modern constructions of the history of art, as in Winckelmann’s art history, as well as Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of Artists of 1550, and impacted the notions regarding style in general attest to the complexity of the history of style as an independent empirical category for analysis.
We propose to investigate the following questions:
-Historiography of style: how are styles conceptualized at different times and in different realms? What relation can we trace between rhetorical and artistic styles?
-Histories of art and histories of rhetoric: what purpose does the comparison to art serve in the purpose of narratives of literary history?
-How do categories of style intersect with biological and other scientific classifying practices?
-Fall and decline and other forms of periodization: to what extent is the historiographical narrative of decline in one medium influenced by accounts of other forms of decline in the other? To what extent, is fall and decline a Greco-Roman way of apprehending historical change as it pertains to style?
Support is generously provided by the Yale Classics Department and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund. For more information, contact irene.peirano@yale.edu
Fridays from 12-2 in Phelps 401. A light lunch will be provided.
Colloquium Participants
Organizers: Milette Gaifman (Departments of Classics and History of Art) and Irene Peirano Garrison (Department of Classics)
The discipline of Classics stands at a curious crossroads in academia. It has been displaced from a position of cultural centrality where it epitomized the old Humanities, to an uneasy, contested status where it is often assumed, wrongly, to be incompatible with new, emergent interdisciplinary Humanities.
In departments of Classics, responses to the contrapuntal history of the discipline challenge the parochial, Western conceptions of a Eurocentric ‘classical antiquity’. Through translation, adaptation, and other processes of mediation, Classics offers a sometimes unlikely cosmopolitan vernacular for diverse phenomena. This year-long colloquium will investigate questions of class and status, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and the history of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome. In addition, there will be reflective commentary on the complex histories of appropriation that have seen Classics mobilized in the service of imperialisms, nationalisms, and other invented traditions.
Support is generously provided by the Yale Classics Department, the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale. For more information, contact sarah.derbew@yale.edu.
Fridays from 12-3 (Talk from 12:00-1:30, lunch from 1:30-2, workshop from 2:00-3:00), in Phelps 401.
Fall 2017
Spring 2018
Since antiquity, histories of ancient Greece and Rome have been written in terms of significant turning points, declines, and falls. These are themselves structured, by mythic paradigms — e.g. the Fall of Troy — or by current theories — e.g. of human generation, growth, and decline. Stories built around these structures give rise to a sense of how history operates, adhering to patterns and cycles that are bigger than any given series of events.
Turning points, declines, and falls thus function as mythemes for the writing of new histories: they are highly extractable as cultural propositions about the way things happen. Such stories are thus capable of being functionalized to serve many new purposes, in whatever past or present that undertakes to tell them again. The purpose of this year-long colloquium is to investigate the manifold ways in which stories of turns, declines, and falls in the ancient world both were told/received in the past and are still told/received in the present.
All meetings except February 6 will be held on Fridays at noon in Phelps 401. A light lunch will be served.
Speakers and Dates
Support is generously provided by the Department of Classics and by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund. Organizers: Kirk Freudenburg and Chris Kraus. For more information contact Christina Kraus.
