GLAM

Archaeology seeks to uncover artifacts and the material culture of human life in order to understand past civilizations and the long-term development of human societies across space and time. This course offers an introduction to the field of archaeology, providing an overview of its goals, theory, methods, and ethics. Students discuss specific archaeological sites in their historical, social, anthropological, economic, religious, and architectural contexts.

This course explores the Greek and Roman ancestors of the modern novel. Ancient prose fiction is steadily attracting more and more attention, for it opens many windows onto ancient attitudes towards gender, love and sexuality, religious belief and practice, and social relations. The ancient novels also happen to be fun to read, full of hairbreadth escapes, wide-ranging travel, intense and often conflicting emotions, complex and surprising events, and humor, sometimes delicate, sometimes shocking.

This class surveys the surviving plays of Aristophanes, Menander, Plautus, and Terence. For Old Comedy, the class will discuss its structural features (such as the chorus and the parabasis), and look at the way that Aristophanes engages with the politics of his day as well as the role of women in Athens. Students learn the canonical definitions of Old, Middle, and New comedy, and see the revolution of style and taste that differentiates Menander from Aristophanes. The class looks at the ways in which comedy transgresses social norms and the role of the carnivalesque in ancient culture.

This course explores ancient Greek and Roman tragedy. Students begin by examining the social, political, and physical contexts in which dramas were performed. Students then read and discuss select plays by the three great surviving dramatists of fifth-century BCE Athens (Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides) and the one great surviving dramatist of Imperial Rome (Seneca the younger).

This course introduces the epic genre in Greece and Rome. The course concentrates on a selection of ancient epic poems including Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Vergil's Aeneid. Students consider each epic as an individual cultural and artistic product, but also how later epics draw upon and respond to earlier ones.

How did a small farming village on the banks of the Tiber River become mistress of an empire stretching from Britain to Egypt? This course explores the political institutions, social structures, and cultural attitudes that enabled Rome to become the world's only superpower at the time. One theme of the course is how that rise to power affected the lives of the Romans and how the Romans affected the lives of all those they encountered.

This course makes an odyssey through Greek political, social, cultural, and economic history from the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BCE) to the death of Alexander the Great (323 BCE). The emphasis is less on the chronicle of events than on understanding the changing nature of Greek society during this period. Major topics to be explored include the development of the city-state as a political unit; notions of equality in ancient Greece; and the simultaneous flourishing of the arts and building of an empire at Athens under Pericles.

Students in this course examine the history of ancient Egypt, from the unification of upper and lower Egypt (ca. 3000 BCE) through the Roman conquest in 30 BCE and beyond. Egypt produced some of the oldest written texts and monumental constructions in the world, many of which had significant impact on other ancient Mediterranean civilizations including Greece and Rome. Students explore these sources to gain insight into the ways of life, rituals, beliefs, hopes and fears of the inhabitants of ancient Egypt.

This course centers on an intensive two-week sojourn in the Eternal City, Rome. Students use the urban topography, ancient ruins, modern reconstructions, and museums to immerse themselves in the lived experience of the city of Rome. Students learn architectural building techniques and systems of dating, problems in identifying surviving buildings, the iconography of Roman political sculpture, and issues of Roman copying and reuse of original Greek art.

This course centers on an intensive three-week academic tour of Greece where students use the sites, landscape, and, museums of Greece as the classroom from which they can make a holistic study of the Greece they had only previous experienced through texts. In other words, this course places ancient Greece and its texts in their real, physical context. In Greece, students spend about 10-12 hours each day on sites, in museums, and in active discussions, including a one-hour seminar discussion at the end of each day.