Global Arc

The astonishing preservation of Pompeii has captured popular imagination ever since it was rediscovered beginning in the 1700s. This course will uncover the urban fabric of the city. We will look at its layout, at public and private buildings and their decoration, and at the wider cultural, geographical and historical contexts. Using physical remains alongside texts in translation, we will explore aspects of the lives of the inhabitants, including entertainment, housing, religion, economy, slavery, political organization and expression, roles played by men and women inside and outside the family, and attitudes towards death.

This lecture course introduces students to the ways in which humanity has grappled with the existence of evil. The focus lies not on natural evils (such as earthquakes and epidemics) but on moral evil, in particular on the critical examination of the many theories and explanations of human wickedness. The course is highly interdisciplinary. It will take into account not only the literature and imagery of various genres and periods, but also feature invited lecturers from Religion, Philosophy and Psychology to empower the class to evaluate and critique contemporary views and prejudices about the nature and origin of moral evil.

Most often seen in opposition, Greco-Roman Classical culture and Christianity have a long history of reciprocal reliance. Neither would look as it does today without the other. Through readings and discussion of both Classical and Christian texts, as well as art and architecture, this course will inquire into the Classical roots of much Christian theology, ethics, cosmology, and values more broadly, while also considering the effect on Classics as a cultural cornerstone of societies beholden to these twin traditions.

Dramatists in the 20th and 21st centuries have repeatedly adapted classical literature to performance on the contemporary stage. In this course we'll ask after the particular uses, pleasures, and challenges of classical adaptation: why adapt ancient material in the first place? How have contemporary dramatists deviated from their sources, and how have they remained "true" to them? We'll consider these and other questions in a survey of a century of performance, ranging from early 20th-century modernism to Hadestown. All readings will be in translation. This course will include a trip to a stage production in New York in spring 2020.

Recent developments in the United States and throughout the world have exposed fault lines in how communities design and regulate forms of citizenship. But current debates over the assignment, withholding, or deprivation of citizen status have a long and violent history. In this course we will attempt to map a history of citizenship from the ancient Mediterranean world to the 21st century. Questions to be tackled include: who/what is a citizen? (How) are exclusion and marginalization wired into the historical legacies and present-day practices of citizenship?

Origins of popular rule at Athens, with special reference to the development of public institutions, social practices, and popular ideaology. Do democratic practices promote material flourishing and/or ethical conduct? Rethinking modern experiments with participatory democracy (utopian communities, workplace democracy, town meetings, teledemocracy, "leaderless movements"). Two 90-minute classes.

This course compares ideologies and practices of monarchic rule across Greece and the Near East. We will investigate how monarchs established their rule, how they faced opposition, and which strategies they adopted to legitimize their power. We will ask what makes a monarch a "tyrant" rather than a "king" and why monarchy turned out to be disgraceful for the Greeks compared to their neighbors. We will read texts produced by royal courts as well as compositions which sketch the profile of the "ideal monarch". We will also look at monuments which monarchs erected during their reigns and investigate their historical and political significance.

The subject of this course will be medieval Greek Romantic fiction. We will read translations of the four surviving novels written in twelfth-century Constantinople in a bid to answer questions about the link between eroticism and the novel, truth and invention in the middle ages, who read fiction and why, and what role, if any, did the medieval or Byzantine Romances have in the story of the European novel. Above all, we will seek to recover some of the pleasure felt by the medieval readers and audiences of these novels.

Designed to give students who are without knowledge of the Greek language the opportunity to read widely and deeply in the field of Greek drama, with particular emphasis on an intensive study of Greek tragedy, its origins and development, staging, structure, and meanings. Two 90-minute seminars.

Major classical historians, especially Herodotus and Thucydides, are studied in connection with the theory and practice of the art or science of history. Lectures and preceptorials treat the development of historical writing and its relationship to philosophy, politics, literature, and science, and problems such as that of fact and interpretation in historical writing. Two lectures, one preceptorial.