Departmental Colloquium 2025-2026: Literary Innovations

The Yale Classics Department colloquium series for 2025-6 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.

Organizers
Benedek Kruchió (Assistant Professor of Classics)
James Uden (Professor of Classics)